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International Journal of English
Literature and Culture
Vol. 2(6), pp. 68-72, June, 2014
ISSN: 2360-7831
DOI: 10.14662/IJELC2014.016
Review
Between passion and sin: a postmodern Feminist approach to Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s the Scarlet Letter
Jayasimha
P.
Dhanekula
Institute of Engg & Technology, Ganguru, Vijayawada – 521139. Ph:
9491678208.
E-mail:
jayasimhachaudhury@gmail.com
Accepted 28
May 2014
Nathaniel
Hawthorne as a romantic writer achieved a special position among the
American writers who never borrowed new themes and motifs outside their
social milieu. This paper explores the Postmodern Feminist critical
approach to emotional behavior of major characters towards the woman
character. The central woman character that has been portrayed as a
sinner for her original sin of adultery, want of freedom from social
restrictions and a desire to grow as an individual with a hope of strong
support from a sinful puritan ‘man’. This paper invites readers’
commonsense to understand the relation between human passions and
morality where the American woman has become a victim of puritan
morality rather than social morality.
Keeping aside all the established theories of genre traditions the
postmodern feminist approach to woman’s morality and freedom in the
middle of social restrictions that emerged from religious moral policing
in the novel have been dealt and analyzed. Woman’s moral individuality
was strictly scrutinized by men in the name of religious outcast of a
sin, much attributed only to woman, called ‘Adultery’. The Postmodern
feminists do not necessarily magnify the design of religious morality
but the way men politicize and utilize such situations in order to curb
woman’s individuality and independence. The American woman who had been
waiting for her turn to grab the fruits of modernity equally with men,
was deceived by the men’s domination.
This paper informs the reader about how ‘Hester’, the central woman
character suffered at the hands of hopeless men who drew her life’s
boundaries. It also analyzes the postmodern elements that contribute to
the real identity of nineteenth century American woman being
emphatically shown as suppression of women by Hawthorne in “The Scarlet
Letter”. The moral restrictions conditioned in the novel have affected
woman’s passions; derived her real happiness and freedom beyond the man
made moral and religious systems of marriage and post-marital life.
Man’s systems of morality and hypocrisy tampered womanhood and her
privacy to choose a life beyond her tolerance and patience.
Keywords: Postmodernism, feminism, moral wilderness, Puritanism,
sin, sinner, alienated woman
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