Sexism In Scarlet Letter

Since the agricultural revolution, women have held subservient positions in society. Even today, inequalities such as gender bias and slut-shaming are constant injustices most women face in their lifetimes. In The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and originally published in 1850, Hawthorne comments openly and often about the infringement of Hester Prynne’s rights as a human and a citizen. He discusses the torment and abuse she endures after being found guilty of adultery, and conveys her shame both directly and through various symbols. Hawthorne’s purposeful victimization of Hester Prynne strongly perpetuates the thematic stance that the oppression women have experienced and still experience at social endeavors, at work, and even …show more content…
Other citizens do not speak to Prynne in public, any friendships she once had are lost after she is convicted of adultery. However, the father of the child remains unnamed, which in a way is Hawthorne taking gender bias in sex-related “sins” to the extreme. Prynne is publicly shamed and outcast for what she has done, and nobody in the town even knows who the father is, allowing him to have a happy social life while Prynne’s disintegrates in the earliest chapters. In fact, it’s even stated that, “The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur of its severity,”(Hawthorne 53). Every witness of Prynne’s public shaming would have watched her die without a single objection; people who had once been good friends would have watched Hester Prynne die because she committed a “crime” out of her love for another human. This is Hawthorne taking slut-shaming to the maximum in Prynne’s social life; the man who played an equal part in this sin is allowed to remain anonymous and punishment-free, while Prynne’s fellow citizens would have gone so far as to murder her for expressing