Essay Review: Hawthorne and Women

“To write a story that favored the outcast so heavily against the establishment might have been an act of sweet revenge on the author’s powerful enemies” (Baym, 36). As a lesbian feminist this idea makes a lot of sense to me. Who wouldn’t want to write a story like that? But it’s sad that “The Scarlet Letter” came out of his mother’s death. It’s a great story though.

Hawthorne lost both his job and his mother at the same time. All he wanted to do was leave. I can see how that makes a lot of sense. He was so into the thought of his mother that he wrote “The Scarlet Letter” rapidly. I can imagine the thoughts running through his mind.

I’m betting he couldn’t get the words on paper fast enough. It came from all his feelings about family and relationships brought on by the death of his mother. Baym says “one looks virtually in vain for a biographical analysis of The Scarlet Letter”(37). I disagree.

It’s not strictly biography, but it does stem from his view of personal experience. Those thoughts of his mother set off a chain reaction that made him focus on the issues in his life, and the past experiences that had the greatest impact on him. This isn’t a bio of his mother, but I think it is the catalyst that set off his search for the important meanings in the relationships in his life.