i. Love and Relationships
Both Hester and Edna had unsatisfying marriages. Hester’s husband send her to New World to seek a new life while he was travelling around the world and being captured. He was an old, ill-proportioned man and Hester was a young and beautiful woman. They had nothing in common, so they had nothing to share in their marriage. However, Hester was always honest to her husband. We can see it in the following passage, “"Thou knowest," said Hester,--for, depressed as she was, she could not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame,--"thou knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any."” (Hawthorne, 72) Her husband also says:
I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,--a man of thought,--the book-worm of great libraries,--a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,--what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl's fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their ownbehoof, I might
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He was a Creole Catholic while Hester was a Presbyterian from Kentucky. Her husband was a member of upper-class so he had to have a good and elite posture in the society while Edna could not fulfil these expectations. For example, she refused to accept the people in her home on Tuesdays which is a nearly mandatory act in the society of Creole Catholics. A young woman sometimes want to be embraced but her husband was not jealous. Chopin says “But for the matter, the Creole husband is never jealous; with him the gangrene passion is one which has become dwarfed by disuse.” (29) This relationship is also defined in the book