Antebellum Period

1. Antebellum Period Mark Snyder Erin Fulkerson Amy Randall Lydia Coalburn

2. History • Invention of Telegraph • Invented by Claude Chappe in 1794 • The electromagnet allowed for the telegraph to communicate • Missouri Compromise • Slavery in the United States is restricted to the Louisiana Territory • Whig Party • Trail of Tears • Indians were forced into Indian territories. • Dred Scott (finish this line) • Slaves were not citizens • This also made the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional

3. Antebellum Women’s Movement • Seneca Falls Convention • Fighting for women’s political privileges and equality under the law. This meeting brought the phrase “all men and women are created equal. • “The prospect of full citizenship for women was not even credible enough to warrant the effort of rejection.” • Separate Sphere’s Ideology • Men were put into the public worlds of business and politics. • Women were put into private world of the home. • This ideology did not hold up well with the working-class, immigrants, and African American women. • 1850 Woman’s Rights Convention • Only women were permitted to participate while males were to be silent spectators. • Focused on property rights, equal custody rights, wages rights, and divorce rights.

4. Nathaniel Hawthorne • Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. • Hawthorne’s great-grandfather was a judge during the Salem Witch Trials • Marriage and Work • Took seven years for him to finish writing his next work, The Marble Faun. • Good friends with Herman Melville • Left Salem in 1849. • Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce • Pierce became the 14th president. • He and Pierce were friends from Bowdoin College. • Moved to Liverpool, England in 1853 • He returned to the united States in 1860 • Nathaniel Hawthorne died on May 18, 1864.

5. The Scarlet Letter • Hester Prynne has had an affair and become pregnant. • Hester hides herself away with Pearl in an abandoned cottage on the edge of town for a private life. • The town starts to slowly accept Hester back into the community for her continued selfless acts of kindness. • Minister Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne meet in the woods at night alone. • Dimmesdale tells Hester that God has forgiven her of her sins, but God will never forgive him. • After the sermon, Dimmesdale called Hester and Pearl up to tell the town of his guilt. • Chillingworth was angry at his death. • Dimmesdale had branded his own chestwith the letter A. • When Chillingworth eventually dies, he leaves all his money to Pearl. • Hester and Pearl had left on the ship they planned to leave with Dimmesdale. • Hester returned years later to the colony alone.

6. Characters

7. Hester Prynne • The way Hester provided for herself and didn’t need a husband to sustain herself and raise her child is gender deviant behavior. • Hester’s self-isolation and strong will cause her to almost lose her child when the other women of the community don’t agree with her alternative lifestyle. • Hester had to be both the mother and father figure to Pearl, because neither Dimmesdale nor Chillingworth would claim her.

8. Pearl • Pearl’s mother raises her less strictly than how other children in the village are brought up. • Pearl is permitted to act according to her wild nature and is not influenced by the villagers to conform. • Pearl is so wild in nature that the villagers consider her a sprite, or a child of the devil, yet she is also referred to as a daughter of the wind, which is a feminine description. • She is considered to be very beautiful and wears feminine, elegant clothing but also aggressive toward the other children of the village and is a very dynamic and willful child, which are decidedly unfeminine characteristics. • These characteristicslead us to view her as androgynous throughout most of the novel.

9. Mistress Gibbens • Mistress Gibbens is considered evil and supernatural like Pearl, because of her claims to know all of the happenings in “her woods”. • The fact that Mistress Gibbins is a wealthy and powerful widow in the community in addition to claims of owning the wood is far from the societal norm of women not being permitted to own property.

10. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale • Dimmesdale is an effeminate man because of his physical and emotional weakness, his dramatic death, and his creative and passionate sermons. “Dimmesdale lacks the ruddy cheek, the frank, manly, blue-eyed gaze… [that] denoted intelligence and trustworthiness in the male in Hawthorne’s era.” (Kreger 319). • Dimmesdale can be compared to female protagonists of novels of the era, supporting the fact that Dimmesdale deviates from the gender norms of the time. • “While Dimmesdale lacks the rigid strength attributed to most ministers in early-American literature as well as the density of the nineteenth-century male physical paradigm, his similarity to the female protagonists of the eighteenth century novels is string. His pale cheeks, drooping form, bleary eyes, and melancholy aspect are not merely “feminine” qualities but the specific Physical marking of the seduced heroine, a form that nineteenth-century commentators saw as degrading” (Kreger 321).

11. Roger Chillingworth • Chillingworth deviates from social norms because of his unusual hegemony over Dimmesdale. • Chillingworth is masculine in nature as he is aggressive and dominant over Dimmesdale. Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are locked in an erotic triangle in which the two compete over Hester and Pearl. Neither man wanted mother or child in reality, they just feel the need to clash over the woman and child affect on their reputation. • Dimmesdale however is by profession a caregiver, which can be viewed as a very feminine profession.

12. Separate Spheres • Dimmesdale and Hester share completely different social spheres. • Hester lives in an almost entirely private sphere, and raises Pearl there. • This causes Pearl’s gender deviance from a lack of interaction with the public sphere. • Dimmesdale’sentire life consists of the public sphere, as he is a servant of the people. • Overlapping of private and public spheres through the adultery • Overlapping in the forest when Dimmesdale and Hester try to leave the colony. • This forest paralleled to the forest in As You Like It because they are both representative of a period of transition