Hester and "Femininity"

"If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or... crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more."

This powerful quote seems to allude to Freud's idea of femininity. Freud asserts that the ideal female will become passive, similar to the concept of tenderness. If a woman is not successful in achieving passivity, she is at risk of becoming sexually neurotic, or frigid. Likewise, Hawthorne seems to suggest a similar concept that Hester has somehow abandoned her womanliness, or sexuality in her necessary, yet aggressive, attempts to survive. These binary conceptions of women are quite popular, but also very dangerous, they imply that women can only possess one simple quality, for instance, a woman is either "smart" or "beautiful." Therefore, when Hester is able to be simultaneously sexual, tender and tenacious, Hawthorne opposes Freud's idea of femininity by portraying a very modern heroine, who serves as a complex dichotomy of human characteristics.