This woman was meant to portray the historical Ann Hibbins, who was executed for witchcraft in 1656. Apart from Hester and her daughter Pearl, only the ‘town witch’ comes to mind when looking for an example of a different type of woman: Everyone avoids the witch, but she does not seem to care, and even tries to tempt Hester into witchcraft.

In The Scarlet Letter, the portrayed women are usually pious, passive and obedient. Years later, Hester comes back to Boston and is buried alongside Dimmesdale after her death.” 8 She works hard to support her daughter Pearl, gives her hand to people in need and finally regains respect, dignity and admiration.

Living in complete isolation from the community, Hester is determined to protect her lover’s reputation and tries her best to re-establish her relationship with people in town on a friendly and honest basis. Different from Dimmesdale, Hester turns to be brave and positive toward the punishment and the scarlet letter A. Nan Lei explains: “Dimmesdale is worn out by his inner conflicts, his love for Hester. This is very much what happens to Hester, the heroine of the Scarlet Letter, who struggles with finding a job and a little respect after her relations with the priest Arthur Dimmesdale come to light. While a man was free to seek the company of women other than his wife and even prostitutes, an unfaithful woman was usually shamed and excluded from society. Their social position was also much less stable. It was believed that a woman’s duty and pleasure was to be a wife, and once married, whatever they possessed was their husband’s. Their career choices were also quite limited due to their inability to pursue a higher education, with universities still mostly closed to women in the nineteenth century. American women were unable to vote until 1920. It is based on this belief of the ‘separate spheres’ of the two sexes that women reigned over the household, while men had the right to do as they pleased in the outside world. In the nineteenth century, women were still considered inferior to, or at the very least vastly different from, men in some regards. To enable doing so, a number of critical voices on the topic will be analysed, and it will be discussed if, and how, the text portrays woman differently than they were wanted to behave when the novel was published in 1850. In this essay, it will be discussed how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letterengages with the role of women in the nineteenth century based on the example of the protagonist, Hester Prynne.

The Girl from Jakarta by Hester Keegan