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This thesis aims to examine whether Nathaniel Hawthorne was an orthodox espouser of patriarchal attitudes or an author of a feminist stamp. But my final opinion is that, although Hawthorne is not easily categorized, he is, at least in The Scarlet Letter, a strong feminist. There are many critics who insist on Hawthorne's ambivalent and ambiguous attitudes in the plot of this novel. Judith Fryer revealed patriarchal attitudes in Hawthorne while recognizing other conflicting attitudes, those that in Nina Baym's words had always presented problems for early feminists. Kristin Herzog, however, has perpetuated Fryer's image of Hester as a darkly sensual type of Eve. Mary Suzanne Schriber points out that Hester is herself ambivalent, or self-divided. Regarding the novel's ambivalent attitude toward Hester, Schriber suggests that it results from inconsistencies in the mind of the unreliable narrator, as well from differences between the narrator's views and those of the implied author.
A male feminist Leland S. Person argues that Hawthorne is not really a nineteenth-century feminist and that The Scarlet Letter is unsettled and unsettling in its treatment of women. Shari Benstock also shows that, at once backward- and forward-looking, Hawthorne is as patriarchal as he is prototypically feminist.
Hawthorne describes Hester as subverter of the Puritan-patriarchal laws of meaning in two ways. First, she embroiders and embellishes the letter A, thereby confusing it. Second, Hester refuses to name her child's father, thereby placing Pearl outside the bounds of Puritan ideology. In this case we think the author as a feminist. Above all Hawthorne, in the “conclusion” of his story, emphasizes that “Hester assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.…The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end.”