" This seems powerful evidence that she has not accepted Puritan gender roles, but instead, is defending and helping to uplift the man who got her into this situation, and who is looked up to as a spiritual leader, while she is a spiritual outcast. The contrast is striking between the two, yet she is the strong one.

There was neither "irritation or irksomeness" in Hester (124) and the "blameless purity of her life during all these years in which she had been set apart to infamy, was reckoned largely in her favor." On page 128, more back-up to the fact that she made the most of a bad situation, and emerged in effect thumbing her nose at the Puritan fanaticism that put her to public shame: "...Her life had turned in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought... [and] the world's law was no law for her...
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