Gabriela Serrano

The Feminine Ancestral Footsteps: Symbolic Language Among Women in the Scarlet Letter and the House of the Seven Gables Gabriela Serrano

As readers of Hawthorne?s fiction, we interpret the author?s text but often neglect the reading audience within the narrative. Hawthorne?s narrators and characters come to their own independent understanding of the text. Specifically, female characters read symbols differently from males, the narrators within the text, and even the general reading audience. Hawthorne illustrates how individuals discover how to read different perspectives into his narrative. This book provides a new perspective, the female character?s perspective, on Hawthorne?s first two major novels. The study focuses on relationships among women in early, American literature which will give the reader insight into American culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Those working on Hawthorne studies and scholars from various disciplines would benefit from this study of Hawthorne's narrative approach because it closely examines early American literature and culture through language.