Is The Scarlet Letter a Feminist Novel?

A man wrote it. A man whose own ancestor, by his descendant's account, once ordered a woman's tongue cut out. And yet The Scarlet Letter has been read for more than a century as one of the great early American novels about a woman's right to think, to choose, and to live by her own law. Megan Marshall, who has spent her career writing the lives of nineteenth-century women, reads the book as genuinely radical on the woman question, while refusing to flatten the contradictions that make it complicated. Her answer, in her Rebind commentary, is yes: Nathaniel Hawthorne lifted the most advanced feminist theory of his moment, Margaret Fuller's, and put it in Hester Prynne's mind — a yes with the texture left in.