The enduring search for female salvation in American literature is
first expressed through typology, an interpretive framework that
pairs type with antitype, historical scriptural promise with future
spiritual fulfillment. When Cotton Mather invokes the typos of
Esther in Ornaments of the Daughters of Zion, a Puritan conduct
book, he offers a female type of divine wisdom, authority and
force. In the biblical Book of Esther, Esther acts as a female type
of wisdom and redemption, but her story also engages the larger
history of Hebrew salvation. In nineteenth-century America,
Margaret Fuller seeks to extend the spiritual claims once made by
Mather and establish the role of the divine female in the salvation
of American culture and society. Fuller supplants the type of male
sacrifice with a type of female transfiguration in works such as
Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Nathaniel Hawthorne then
transforms these iconoclastic ideals into literary life by engaging
the multi-faceted figure of Esther as a typos of female redemption
and salvation in "Legends of the Province House," The Scarlet
Letter, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. Through his
female characters -- Esther Dudley, Hester Prynne, Zenobia, and
Miriam -- he seeks to fulfill the divine destiny of the American
woman. Hawthorne discovers, however, that female redemption is
followed by revenge, as Esther turns from saving her people to
ensuring an end to their oppression. When Henry Adams later revives
Esther Dudley in his novel Esther, he rejects male redemption for
the American woman. In Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel, and
The Education of Henry Adams, Adams envisions an independent,
eternal woman who can rival the political, scientific, artistic,
and theological power of men. The movement from male to female
salvation is achieved when the terms of female redemption are
transformed and the American woman is established as her own source
of divine wisdom, power, retribution, and force. The typology of
female transfiguration in America is fulfilled by Fuller,
Hawthorne, and Adams through the promise extended by the type of
Esther.
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