Edna Pontellier and Hester Prynne

Edna Pontellier from The Awakening and Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter are quite similar. Both of the women have a hard time fitting into the community they live in. Edna is not from Grand Isle and is not of Creole decent, so she feels out of place with the Creoles, "Mrs. Pontellier, though she had married a Creole, was not thoroughly at home in the society of Creoles: never before had she been thrown so intimately among them"(Chopin 12). Mrs. Pontellier came from Kentucky, not New Orleans, which was where her husband was from. Similarly, Hester came from England and was sent to a Puritan colony in America by her husband. Hester's husband did not accompany her, so she was forced to live in a foreign place on her own. The reader can see that both women had to follow their husbands' orders and go to a place which was unfamiliar to them. Speaking of husbands, one can see that Edna is not entirely in love with her husband. She has some feelings building up for her friend Robert Lebrun, "Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined... A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, a light which, showing the way, forbids it" (Chopin 17). It seems as though there may be an affair happening in the near future.  Also, Hester Prynne did have an affair with a man named Arthur Dimmesdale. She thought her husband was dead and never coming back, but she was still shunned in her town because adultery was a sin. Back in that time, marriage was not for love, but social status. So both women may not have had feelings for their husbands, but were forced to marry them for a higher class life.