Yellin's The Scarlet Letter And The Antislavery Feminist

“The Scarlet Letter and the Antislavery Feminists” Jean Fagan Yellin, in her essay “The Scarlet Letter and the Antislavery Feminists,” argues that The Scarlet Letter’s motifs and language reject the doctrines of the antislavery feminists and instead reinforce patriarchal norms and ideas. Yellin’s purpose is to reveal Hawthorne’s rejection of feminist ideals in order to help her readers examine how The Scarlet Letter upholds the patriarchal status quo of Hawthorne’s era. Yellin convincingly employs ample text evidence to explain how language used in the novel represents the continuation of patriarchal structures, as well as employing allusions and metaphors to show how the town views Hester in terms of her womanhood and how the denial of Hester’s
Her analysis starts from the first scaffold scene in the book and analyzes Hester’s development throughout the book, ending with the third scaffold scene, which ends both the book and Yellin’s argument. Additionally, she utilizes ample text evidence to support her point. Because her argument covered the book as a whole, she needed text evidence from all parts of the book to prove her point, and she successfully integrated text evidence to show that her argument applies to most parts of the book. Furthermore, she employs insightful commentary to make her point. This increases the credibility of her argument because her commentary is able to parse Hawthorne’s words and determine his intent behind them in order to view the work overall through the lens of women’s position in society. Her commentary has not only a broad, big picture outlook but also a more specific outlook, with it examining both the book overall and specific quotes within it to enhance her argument
At the beginning of the book, Hawthorne immediately takes a jab at women in general, writing that “the women [of Boston] … stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex” (Hawthorne 38). Hawthorne states here that women should be like men through his use of litotes. Hawthorne first compares Queen Elizabeth I to a man and, because of this, calls her as a “not altogether unsuitable” woman. This comparison implies that women who are like men are suitable “representations of their sex” and that women who meet the standard definition of femininity are thus “unsuitable” representations. This further implies that men are better than women because only a “man-like” woman can be an adequate representation of women overall. Overall, this displays Hawthorne’s anti-female, and pro-male, bias through his description of women as worse than men, and the description shows Hawthorne’s favor of the patriarchy because he believes that women are “unsuitable,” for the most part, to take place in government and societal structures. Furthermore, “The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester’s good qualities than the people. [Their] prejudices… were fortified in