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Power Of Women In The Crucible By Arthur Miller And The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Power for women is not much back in the 1600s. Women had no power at all in the government, and as natural they find power in other effects. A lot of them did it in marriage. In the works, The Crucible by Arthur Miller and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrated the control of women in the Puritan times. Even though in both The Crucible by Arthur Miller and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, women have less power in the society than men, in The Crucible women have a better say in the action of the society than the women in The Scarlet Letter. Similarity in the playwright The Crucible by Arthur Miller and the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is the power that women have power in marriage. For women marriage …show more content…

In The Crucible the women can leave the church and court if she want to or thing that what the head of the church or court are doing something they don’t agree with wrong. The people did this when the court started to execute people for saying they were not witches (The Crucible). However, The Scarlet Letter the women just had to stay or get in trouble. Hester couldn’t good anywhere, but outside the village because she had no choice. The novel showed she was pushed outside of the society and she could not leave because she had no money. Before that, she also had to stand at the scaffolding and stay there to be humiliated. From the novel, it says, “Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once”(Hawthorne …show more content…

The most troubling problem that women have had is having a choice, and people have fought for it for centuries. This is show through both of the plots, but they are different in the level the women have. With that, The Crucible shows several time that women and men talk on the same level. A women can also feely yell at a man, and voice her feelings. They can also say yes or no on their own. This is show when John Proctor’s wife is able to choose to sign or not to sign a paper on confession (The Crucible). On the other hand, The Scarlet Letter has women needing to just to stand there and take everything. Hester had no choice on where she was going in life, and who she will married. She was forced to marry Chillingworth, and then set off to a town in Boston. She was talked about in a bad manner because her husband left her in the town alone. According to the

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Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, are set in the seventeenth century puritan New England. Adherence to puritan values is paramount, yet both protagonists commit grievous sins around which the plot revolves. The fall from grace, the subsequent consequences and the transformation of all the characters is uniform across both books. The metamorphosis of the protagonists is similar yet so distinct that it seems that Hawthorne and Miller are trying to convey the same message in different dialects of the same language.

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On the other hand Hester doesn’t want or try getting attention through her actions. Also she becomes an outcast of the Puritan community and she slowly finds her way back through hard work and showing she cares. Secondly the way the two characters

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In The Scarlet Letter the narrator says, “Be true! Be true! If you will not show the world your worst, at least show some quality that suggests to others the worst in you!” (Hawthorne, 224) This quote accurately sums up the dilemma that the characters in The Crucible by Arthur Miller and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne face.

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller and Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne are two stories that are based on mass hysteria and public shaming. Both stories and their topics are what helped to shape America’s early identity. In The Crucible, the townsfolk accept and become active in the hysterical climate not only out of genuine religious piety but also because it gives them a chance to express repressed sentiments and to act on long-held grudges”. This shows that there is mass hysteria in the story based on the quotation and its explain why people have mass hysteria or why they do it. A group of teenage girls is discovered dancing naked in the woods by the town minister.

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Everyone longs for success. They desire the acceptance and approval for following their moral compass, being rewarded, and being acknowledged. However, one cannot maintain success without a purposeful and achievable position of power. In The Crucible by Arthur Miller the power of society is bound upon a pronounced hierarchy. Men naturally are deemed as having higher status than women in society.

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The stereotypes applied to nineteenth century women were not just stereotypes, they were realities. Women were expected to stay home and do all the cooking and cleaning for their family. They were entirely dependent on their male counterparts for all their tasks outside the domestic sphere. They were generally considered unintellectual and uneducated. Women were generally suppressed in early society.

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Power is defined as “The ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as as a faculty or quality.” Throughout history, women have significantly lacked not only power but the ability to be recognized as equal to their male counterparts. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, women are somewhat able to successfully gain power from society due to the fact that they use manipulation, deceit and their sexual desire (especially the character of Abigail) to acquire positions of power in their largely patriarchal society. Women are able to attain this power through using their intellect to express manipulation, and lying in order to receive attention that translates into power.

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Two women in the play that display this ability are Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Williams. The first example of an influential woman, is Elizabeth Proctor. She is wife to John Proctor and, though she may seem to wield little power in her relationship with him, she has great influence and power over his eventual fate. Many women in this novel are submissive and often hysterical but Elizabeth holds her ground and when accused and put on trial, is confident in her innocence.

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Even though she is supposed to be humiliated in front of the town as punishment for her adultery, she smiles proudly and wears her scarlet letter as a badge. In this instance, Hester refuses to accept her punishment thereby nullifying the punishment. If Hester were to be embarrassed on the scaffold, she would give her punishment the power to be a punishment. However, when Hester instead smiles on the scaffold, she shows that she won’t let her sin control her, no matter what the other townspeople think of her. Another example of how Hester denies her punishment is how she designed the scarlet letter.

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The Feminist Part of The Crucible. Feminism In the novel The Crucible by Arthur Miller, I see a lot of feminism present throughout Salem, Massachusetts in the 1960s. One way it is present is with how men hold all the power, with jobs and they have more power than women in all. Also, Miller makes it seem like women are liars during the whole play.

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The Scarlet Letter, a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, functions as an evaluation of Puritan ideas, customs, and culture during the 17th century. Through this evaluation, we can get a good idea of what core values and beliefs the Puritans possessed, as well as the actions they take in cases of adversity brought about by “sinners”. Some Puritan virtues created stark divisions between groups of people, some of which led to discrimination under certain circumstances. One of the most prominent of these is the treatment and standards of men and women, a concept that surfaced during some of the major points in The Scarlet Letter. The divisions that were created by Puritan standards of men and women played a great role in shaping the plot of The Scarlet Letter, determining the fate of many of the characters.

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In its society, there is the assumption that the male gender is superior, therefore holds more influence over others and gather more power. It is also assumed that females have slight power over men to manipulate them into doing things or believing things by using their femininity and innocence. These powers are displayed quite evidently in The Crucible which is set in a patriarchal society. In The Crucible, women were nothing without a husband or a father, no rights to own property, no rights to have a job and make a living, no rights. Yet when Abigail Williams convinced her friends to lie and falsely accuse others of being witches, the male judges had no qualms about believing them.

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The Deep Roots of Sexism: Preconceived Sin and Weakness In the Christian bible, when the first woman commits the first sin she creates an enduring image of her gender; she is drawn away from god and purity, to evil and sin. The book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller both deal with not only sin in Puritan times, but the ignominy stemming from women’s wrongdoings. The Scarlet Letter follows Hester Prynne, a woman who, after committing adultery is forced to wear a scarlet A to punish her for her sins. The Crucible is about the Witch Trials in Salem, which are brought on by the beautiful, manipulative and jealous Abigail.

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(Hall, 127). This idea of a fair and just society was the centerpiece of Puritan society, and it subsequently led to the virtue of community over the individual which was previously discussed. When it comes to The Scarlet Letter, the ideology that Puritan morality is fundamental to everything is truly front and center. Hester’s struggle due to her past sin is a perfect example of this; The ministry attempted to purify and protect the community by excluding Hester from societal affairs, even going as far as attempting to strip Hester of her custody of Pearl. Overall, Hester’s forced

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936 Words | 4 Pages

In the “Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays hypocrisy of the Puritan society, where the protagonist Hester Prynne face many consequences of her actions and the how she tries to redeem herself to the society. During the seventeenth puritans believe that it is their mission to punish the ones who do not follow God’s word and it is their job to stop those from sinning. Therefore, the hypercritical puritan society punishes Hester harshly for committing adultery, but in Hester’s mind, she believes that what she did was not a sin but acts of love for her man. Eventually, she redeems herself by turning her crime into an advantage to help those in need, yet the Puritan society still view her as a “naughty bagger.” (Hawthorne 78)

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