The woman who stands alone

Well, I seem to have plunged into the heart of the matter that I formerly addressed, namely classic male authors who don't understand the nature of women. It is hard to say weather Nathaniel Hawthorne understood women in The Scarlet Letter however D.H. Lawrence in his afterword on the work clearly did not. I quote "As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by a man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force, She can't help herself." D.H. Lawrence basically describes woman as evil and Hester Prymme in particular, as a witch. That's not original, it's a common response, however Hester was not a witch. O how many women have burned and died in vain for a similar mindset like his.

I think that The Scarlet letter is about a woman who stands alone. She is an outcast of society and she's an alone mother. Her daughter Pearl, so precious yet so peculiar awakens the suspicions of the society as well, they wonder "is she the devils child" The story paints a grotesque picture of how evil the puritan society was and I don't doubt that it was, just that, an evil, not a Christian society in fact. I found on the internet a blogger who writes about banned books, and on this site I found that The Scarlet Letter wasn't merely banned in the 1960's in Michigan for instance on the account of some parents who found it too controversial that a minister and a married woman acted out adultery in the book. Apparently there has been groups who've been keen on banning it already 110 years before that. 

If D.H.Lawrence (Whom by the way, I have no feeling to read anymore since I read his review) would simply have gotten over his misogynistic western thoughts he might have realized that as the sun rises in the East to shed light on his darkened mind. Christ Jesus too was born out of a woman, Holy Mother of God. The woman is not an intruder in the cosmos and she doesn't need to be encompassed, surrounded by a man, who guards her step and her moral. Christ our Lord, was at a time encompassed about by the Virgin Mary just as now the Church is the Mother for all believers. The female is not only a natural, but a supernatural element in the process of mankind's salvation. 

The protestant tradition (in as much we will call Henry the eight VII, a man of six wives, founder of the protestant movement in England against the Roman pope, who would not allow him to re-marry) is the ground from whence puritans emerged. They (Puritans) would naturally think of woman as evil, and their fight against Rome and their efforts against The Church of England was essentially a spiritual battel against oneself where only women and children would get hurt. I am yet to read about Byzantine society but I have already preconceived thoughts on the fact that misogynism is clearly a western thing. To not have the whole Church, as in the Eastern Orthodox Church (from whence Rome divorced in 1054) naturally meant that there wasn't a full view of male and female, as D.H. Lawrence so precisely shows in his nasty elaboration on the story, if you wish to read it, here it is D.H. Lawrences shitty take on things 

Personally I was touched by The Scarlet Letter perhaps I too should need to have such a letter embroidered on my chest. A could stand for anything, but for a solitary mother, there where elements which seemed more than familiar to me, they seemed mine. 

"She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest...Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods." Then a long paragraph where Hester criticizes the institutions of the puritan world "The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones, -and they had made her strong.." 

Hawthorne describes accurately how the strain of being ostracized as an alone mother causes weird thoughts to emerge about her solitude and her coping mechanisms with raising her daughter alone. Like Enoch in the Bible, Hester Prymm's daughter disappears to the reader when she reaches adulthood. The book speculates, did Pearl marry happily, supposedly so. She was taken up by society and the mother on her old age returned to the cottage by the sea. Once a scorned woman, always a scorned woman. Though the Scarlet letter may never really wear off from a woman's breast I beg to chance that Hester had a more real experience of the world and a more genuine outlook on life than women who didn't bear such a mark. Imagine still, Kain in the book of beginnings (Genesis) and how the Lord put a mark on him, a murderer, so that he would not be murdered. The mark on Hester brought only condemnation on those who looked on her and thought themselves better than her. 

When I think of Hester however i first think of Demi Moore and I struggled to not think of her throughout the book, because the 90's film wasn't true to the book and also because I would have wanted to see Hester differently. Secondly I thought about Judith from The Bible who seduced and murdered Holofernes, an enemy of Israel. But if every man innocent and every woman guilty, then I would understand why every woman living and breathing is the suspect enemy of state.

Ultimately I failed to understand why Arthur Dimmesdale had to die on the scaffold, by his own accord. Was it that Hester was able to bear her sin before God, walk with it's load through open spaces, meaning Able to suffer other peoples scorn and Dimmesdale wasn't. I don't get the point, however I do think that the book has a happy ending for Hester, and solitude isn't half bad, if you live by the ocean. 

P.s. Now I will not reveal what books I am to read next, I have a goal of 24 books in 24 but I found that even giving away my plans to a perhaps imaginary audience of readers of this blog, spoils the fun for me. So I will write what I've read as I go along.