The Complexities of Female Beauty in The Scarlet Letter and The Hunchback of Notre Dame Eve Mandel College

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is set in Salem, Massachusetts in 1642, while Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame takes place in Paris, France in 1482. Despite their vastly different settings, Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne and Hugo’s character Paquette la Chantefleurie share remarkably similar experiences with public shame and motherhood. The authors’ depictions of these characters reveal the cruel way that their societies, whether Protestant or Catholic, New World or Old, accept female beauty as decent and acceptable only in a state of girlish innocence or nurturing maternity: a woman’s romantic nature or sexuality, implied by her beauty, often provokes judgement and contempt.

Both Hester Prynne and Paquette la Chantefleurie lose their youthful beauty as a result of being perceived as sexually promiscuous. Standing in front of the crowd as part of her punishment for committing adultery, Hester’s life seems to flash before her eyes. Hawthorne writes, “She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it” (55). Hawthorne emphasizes the magic of fresh-faced innocence with the words “glowing” and “illuminating.” That...