In the book "The Scarlet Letter" Nathaniel Hawthorne characterized Hester Prynne to also accept some certain gender roles which turn out to help her in the end. “She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain," remarked one of her female spectators”(pg112), when she had to create her own "A" her normal roles as a woman helped her create something beautiful out of something that was meant to shame her and cause her pain. As a female, Hester Prynne is meant to look delicate and beautiful, “She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty" (pg121). She both embraces and rejects at least one gender role for both,male and female, when she is on the scaffold with “infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.” (pg123)
The famous author Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts ideas of patriarchal ideology through the character of Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter". Hester Prynne not only enforces patriarchal ideology but she also undermines or rejects it through out the novel. Through out the novel Hester Prynne shows that she can not only be feminine but also masculine and it turns out to help her get her life back in order, towards the end of the novel. She struggled through the pain and the torture to help others and to show that she wasn't a bad person and successfully defined feminism along the