Hester Prynne and Emma Bovary were created equal by Hawthorne and Flaubert respectively. They were painted by the same brush. They were coming from two different parts of the globe and lived at times with a gap of two centuries. Hester lived in the 17th Century Puritan Boston and Emma Bovary came from the 19th Century French bourgeois society. Still they were akin in many respects. They were similar in their physical beauty and they both possessed romantic hearts. These adulteresses were perfect beauties. Hester’s tall figure, rich
2 black hair and her glowing white skin recalled oriental queens. Flaubert endowed Emma with pale skin, black curls and large black eyes. Imagination, dreams and fancy held them above their societies. Hester had a “wild and picturesque peculiarity” (Hawthorne 82). Emma was in the perpetual search for the intoxicating joys of love. They were also alike in their hatred for their husbands and their mediocre married life. Hester could not love her old hunchback husband who valued scholarship over his
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The same was true of his adulteress Emma. For Emma adultery was a poetry or a marvelously sweet existence in the supernal realm. She contemplated it an ethereal state of being that elevated her above the petty bourgeois existence. Her act of adultery was part of her desperate effort to fly into the immense space from her mediocre married life. She relished its “Passion, ecstasy and delirium” (Flaubert 124). Embracing her personal moral codes, she reveled in adultery without any prick of conscience. Moreover, she made an all out effort to cling to adultery and never repented her action. She sought the celestial lover of her dreams in two males--the Clerk Leon and the land owner Rodolphe. Love letters, tears and kisses touched sweetness in her. She never believed that adultery was a sin and her suicide at the end of the novel was not an act of
Three gossips present at Hester’s public shaming moan at Hester’s “merciful” punishment, one even going as far as declaring “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die.” (Hawthorne 36). As time passes, however, and Hester dutifully lives out her penance, the people start to see the piety of her everyday actions. After seven years, they go from crying for her death to exclaiming “None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty…None so self-devoted as Hester, when pestilence stalked through the town.” (Hawthorne 110). They also declared her “a self-ordained Sister of Mercy…Such helpfulness was found in her,—so much power to do, and power to sympathize,—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able.” (111). When the people of Hester’s town managed to stop gawking at Hester, they easily saw her true nature and changed their ideas to
Hester Prynne, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, exhibits considerable character growth both over the course of her life and during the events of the novel. Her view of herself and her perspective on the role of women in the world evolve as she learns from new experiences. She moves through the stages of self-centered happiness in her childhood, deep despair and depression as an adult, and a later more hopeful and selfless existence.
In the beginning of the novel, Hester Prynne exits the prison of the Puritan community of Boston, a large letter “A” clearly visible on her chest and a child in her arms. This is the first time the letter makes an appearance, and it is here where readers realize Hester has done something terribly wrong. The letter “A” sewn onto her clothes initially represents “adulterer”, but who exactly is the father of Pearl, the child Hester is holding, if her husband has been missing for two years? The townspeople would love to know the answer to that question, too, but it is only revealed to readers a few chapters into the story as being the unexpected Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale faces an
Hester Prynne is a woman of true selflessness. Throughout the work she is constantly ridiculed as a harlot, and perceived as an unfit role model. "In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it” (Hawthorne, ch. 2). This suffering was taken upon by Ms. Prynne as she was chastised by the townspeople. The archetype that Prynne represents is that of a martyr. She finds herself in various amounts of trouble that are, in truth, not her fault entirely. For example, she is sentenced to wear the red ‘A’ across her chest as a symbol of her extreme crime of adultery
The portrayal of Hester Prynne in the novel, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, has led to many different opinionated views. Many debate whether or not Hester Prynne should be portrayed in an angelic or sinful light. The author and critic, D.H. Lawrence, focuses on Hester’s sin itself, and focuses on having the reader view an alternate perspective of Hester, seeing her not as the victim, but as the criminal, as she should be viewed based on traditional Puritan values. Lawrence achieves the perspective that Hester should be viewed in a sinful light through his rhythmic and fluid syntax, negative and hateful diction, as well as his sarcastic and critical tone.
Unlike today, women in the 1850’s did not have rights to do many things. Women had limited freedom, but Hester Prynne stood up for her rights and beliefs. Not only she was a feminist character in book, but also the people and their cultures and religion made her that way. In the book, it says that she is beautiful, tall, thin, and dignified woman. She is also said to be good with decorating and making clothes and helps the poor by donating clothes to them. She is not a woman who just sins and be proud of herself. Throughout the story, Hester Prynne tries not to sin and penitent what she did and helps...
Most everyone has two sides to their character, one that shows in public and one that stays confined to the safety of a more private setting. However, there are times when the private side overshadows the public persona and escapes. Then the person is either left standing there to clean up their damaged reputation or liberated with a sense of relief to finally show their true colors to society. Thus creates the predicament of the characters in The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Instead of starting the audience at the beginning of the ordeal, Hawthorne sits the reader right into the aftermath of Hester Prynne’s sin. The unforgiving nature of Puritan culture condemns Hester for having passion for any other besides her husband, even though they do not know if he is even alive at this point. Her private self, the side that longed for another man, overwhelmed her public Puritan image and escaped, leading her down the path of temptation. This Puritan atmosphere collides with many dark romantic elements, such as the guilt and sin of someone romanticized to the reader, and the evocation of sympathy to the “bad” character, the one wrong in the context of the book, but most everyone secretly roots for. Hawthorne mixes the Puritan culture with romantic elements to evince the struggle of the private self to create a false public image and conform to the masses.
Throughout the course of history, the concept of women being subordinate to men has always existed. However, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a woman named Hester Prynne tries to break prejudicial notions against women in a patriarchal society. In the story, Hester commits the crime of adultery and is sentenced by the government to wear a scarlet letter as it symbolizes ignominy. Since she lives in Puritan New England, the people do not value women a lot, her actions becomes a sight of public scrutiny. Yet, with her strength as a woman, she is able to not only survive the situation, but also reverse as she later becomes an important member of their community. In a feminist perspective of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
It is evident to the reader that Hester Prynne is no ordinary women because of her clear defiance of what the Puritan society expects. “A community that embodies the qualities of aging public males must necessarily repress those of the young and female,” which has become an unspoken yet understood way of life in Salem, Massachusetts (Baym, “Defiance” 90). All women are required to be submissive and completely abiding of their husbands’ word. They are not to have any self-expression as it is thought to jeopardize the community as a whole. The manifestation of individuality and personal beliefs is seen as both a threat and a sign of insolence, which are responded to with very sev...
Hester is a youthful, beautiful, proud woman who has committed an awful sin and a scandal that changes her life in a major way. She commits adultery with a man known as Arthur Dimmesdale, leader of the local Puritan church and Hester’s minister. The adultery committed results in a baby girl named Pearl. This child she clutches to her chest is the proof of her sin. This behavior is unacceptable. Hester is sent to prison and then punished. Hester is the only one who gets punished for this horrendous act, because no one knows who the man is that Hester has this scandalous affair with. Hester’s sin is confessed, and she lives with two constant reminders of that sin: the scarlet letter itself, and Pearl, the child conceived with Dimmesdale. Her punishment is that she must stand upon a scaffold receiving public humiliation for several hours each day, wearing the scarlet letter “A” on her chest, represe...
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is virtually banished from the Puritan society because of her crime. She was guilty for adultery with the town’s minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. However, the reader is kept in the dark that Dimmesdale is the child’s father until latter part of the novel. Although Hawthorne’s novel accurately depicts the consequences that Hester and Dimmesdale suffer from their sin, the novel does not accomplish the task of reflecting upon the 17th century Puritan gender roles in Hester and Dimmesdale. For one, the mental and physical states of Hester and Dimmesdale are switched. Hester takes on the more courageous role throughout the novel whereas Dimmesdale takes on the more sensitive role. In addition, Hester is examined in accordance to the gender roles set for today’s American women. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is written in a manner that accurately depicts 17th century Puritan society, but does not accurately show gender roles.
Adultery is considered evil by Puritan belief (Korobkin 3). In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s Scarlet “A” goes against the Puritan community and culture with her conceal of sin, which has negative as well as positive results. Hester was a passionate, persistent woman who wanted to turn her sin into a positive act (Stewart 56).
The values and morals set by the society must be influential to the social norms. Emma Bovary’s society is dominated by the ethics established by males. In reliving their expectations, the pressure is for women to believe they must be wrong, that they are to blame and that there must be something wrong with them. Thus, Emma has no image to seek a basis for her self-esteem. The expectations of men to women are that they must have,
Hester Prynne, the main character of the novel, was a courageous and honorable person; even though, what she had been known for wasn’t such an admirable deed. Hester Prynne was a very strong person in one’s eyes, because even though she had been publically humiliated in front of all of Boston, she still remained confident in herself and her daughter. She was ordered to wear a scarlet colored piece of fabric, with the letter “A” embroidered in gold on it, on her bosom at all times to show that she had committed adultery. She was mocked all the time and constantly looked down upon in society, because of her sin; but instead of running away from her problems, she st...
His appearance truly demonstrates to the reader the ugly corruption taking place in Emma’s soul, as Flaubert illustrates, “He [the blind man] revealed two gaping bloody orbits where the eyelids should have been. His skin was peeling away in red strips; liquid matter flowed from it, hardening into green scabs as far as his nose, the black nostrils of which sniffed convulsively.” Flaubert’s use of vivid detail to describe the blind beggar ironically resembles his equally vivid descriptions of Emma’s unmatched beauty, such as when Flaubert wrote, “Her real beauty was in her eyes; although they were brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and she would look at you frankly, with bold candor,” thus creating a link between Emma and the beggar. Quite understandably, Emma hated looking at his disgusting appearance, just as she also feared facing her moral corruption and the possibility that her actions lacked justness that the blind man represents. His very presence terrified Emma whenever he harassed the carriage traveling to and from her meetings with Léon, which occurred more and more frequently as the novel progressed and Emma fell wholeheartedly into her financial struggles and forbidden romantic