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Relevance of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" to Simon de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

Uploaded by naveed99 on Nov 09, 2015

Simone de Beauvoir's chef d'oeuvre "The Second Sex", of course, is an exposition of 'the pervasiveness, intensity and mysteriousness of the history of women's oppression'. Its primary thesis is that men fundamentally oppress woman by characterising them, on every level, as the 'Other', defined exclusively in opposition to men. Hester Prynne, the chief character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", also does fall victim to such an oppression and becomes a quintessential 'Other' as the novel progresses.

The scarlet letter 'A', which Hester is made to wear for self-abasement and public humiliation, shares a close affinity with Simone de Beauvoir's, perhaps, much despised term 'Woman'. Scarlet letter 'A', like that of the term 'woman', is a physical manifestation of weakness, frailty, sin and the list of derogatory adjectives may go on. It, for Hester, also is a reminder of her painful solitude. She contemplates casting it off to obtain her freedom from an oppressive Puritan society but somehow, like De Beauvoir's term 'woman', could not get herself rid of it. Despite it, says Hawthorne "her beauty shone out, and made a halo of misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped."

Moreover the undertones of De Beauvoir's pithy maxim "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" could be so poignantly heard from the passage:
"Mother", said little Pearl,"the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. . . it will not flee from me, for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!"
"Nor ever will, my child, I hope", said Hester.
"And why not, mother?" asked Pearl, stopping short. . . "Will it not come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?"

Pearl unknowingly becomes a mouthpiece of De Beauvoir while stating those lines. Pearl although unconsciously and De Beauvoir consciously are acutely aware of the hard reality that woman does become, after all, a slave of the established power, "her horizon is limited, her wings are clipped".

As De Beauvoir puts it , "woman does not enjoy the dignity of being a person, she herself forms a part of the patrimony of man." Likewise Hester, being very self sacrificing, does fall a victim to such a patriarchal system. There seems to be a pattern in her relationship with men who can't give her as much as she gives them; be that Roger Chillingworth or Reverend Dimmesdale. Hester falls...

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Uploaded by:   naveed99

Date:   11/09/2015

Category:   Literature

Length:   5 pages (1,038 words)

Views:   2093

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