📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00048 ¶ from Joining the Resistance ¶ Carol Gilligan
Like the hysterical women of the late nineteenth century, Hester Prynne has the character of a resister: “a mind of native courage and activity” (p. 183), a woman whom fate and fortune had set free:
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, but taught her much amiss. (pp. 183–4)
In the end, then, she must be corrected, and unlike Dora—Freud’s patient who flees from what had become the iron framework of his treatment, leaving her analysis in mid-stream—Hester, in the dark conclusion of Hawthorne’s brooding novel, reassumes the Puritan mantle. She assures the women who come to her for counsel and comfort that there will be a new order of living between women and men, grounded not in sorrow but in mutual happiness. She knows that “the angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman” and had once imagined this prophetess might be herself. But the angel must be “lofty [and] pure” as well as beautiful, wise “not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy … and sacred love” (p. 241). Hawthorne thus captures the catch-22 of feminism: the very woman who is able to envision a new order of living is, by the same token, unable, since the passion that enables her also adulterates her in the eyes of the Puritans. Released from goodness, she is imprisoned in badness, within the framework of a puritanical order. But her mind is free to question the order.
—Carol Gilligan
—found in Joining the Resistance (2011)