Compare and Contrast Pieces of Literature

¶ … Hawthorne and Poe, both authors depict women who struggle and suffer at the hands of masculine stereotypes. In Hawthorne's "Rapaccini's Daughter" and The Scarlet Letter, and Poe's "Ligeia" the depiction of women characters illustrates each authors sensitivity to the plight of women in the 19th Century.

Considering that Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote in the radical cultural milieu of Concord, Massachusetts, alongside such women's rights luminaries like Emerson, the Alcott sisters, and of course, Margaret Fuller, it is not surprising to find in his literary works a treatment of women that demonstrates, above all, an immense sensitivity to the plight of women struggling for freedom in a man's world. Yet In both "Rappaccini's Daughter" and The Scarlet Letter, published before and after the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, Hawthorne's women characters suffer because of masculine notions of feminine beauty and character.

In Rappaccini's Daughter" Hawthorne tells a stark tale of a woman manipulated by her father's selfish ambitions. Her father, Rappaccini, is "not restrained by natural affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal for science." Beatrice is described at the end of the story as "a poor victim of man's ingenuity," destroyed by the unwieldy hand of man, her father's as well as Giovanni's. Both men thrust upon her their notions of femininity. Giovanni's desire for a woman of beauty is the catalyst for Beatrice's downfall. If he had never invaded the privacy of her garden, the tragedy would have never occurred. As Beatrice says to Giovanni as she is dying, "was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature, than in mine"

Her father desired, ironically, to create a strong woman not "exposed to all evil and capable of none," and yet she suffered from the one evil he could not prevent; the destructive force of men.

In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne's depiction of Hester is representative of the plight of the 19th century women's movement. He uses a similar theme of male persecution of women, but this time the causes of his woman character's suffering has more to do with the societal stereotypes of womanly virtue in a patriarchal society. Women in Hester's time were expected to be chaste and virtuous, as they were in Hawthorne's, and his audience as well as the Puritan community depicted in the novel expected "fallen women" to come to miserable and tragic ends. Hester "discerns...a hopeless task before her," one in which, the rectification of her plight, and the plight of "the whole race of womanhood" is dependent on a complete transformation of "the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature." The problem is societal, "as a first step the whole system of society is to be torn down."