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Some Observations about Hawthorne's Women
by Barbara Ellis

At the start of the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott, the best-selling author of the historical potboiler (114,000 books sold in France alone during his lifetime1) may have changed the role of women characters forever in this country when he created Jeanie Deans. This heroine of his vastly successful The Heart of Midlothian (1818) played none of the stereotypic roles assigned women: Magdalene/Eve, madonna, wife of Bath, drudge, vampire. She was an Innocent who did murder.

Scott did not seize the opportunity to employ the usual slant on Eve, Motherhood, or the Sixth Commandment. Instead, he documented what happened to a woman who committed infanticide because she was ground down by the powers of economics, society, and institutionalized religion. When an author made a murderer his principal character and evoked sympathy for her, even spurred humane laws for women caught in such binds -- and still earned......

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Approximate Word Count: 5680
Approximate Pages: 23 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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