Sexuality and American Culture

The nature of 19th century American public and private spheres and the conflicts and contradictions that emerged around the subject of sexuality were prominently featured in this week's readings.

In her essay, Smith-Rosenberg concludes with an essential point:  “The supposedly repressive and destructive Victorian sexual ethos may have been more flexible and responsive to the needs of particular individuals than that of the mid-twentieth century.”  In echoing Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, this statement succinctly rejects the misconceptions about American sexuality in Victorian times.  The 19th century sexual ethos is not defined by a struggle between normal and abnormal, rather it is a “continuum or spectrum” with a “wide latitu

 When I started reading this week’s text, I was kind of amazed by the amount of writers who found the idea of women friendships so intriguing. Being someone who has so many female friends, I never really thought of why that was the case or what it could mean about the kind of person I am and stories I told. I especially liked this week’s readings because it made me appreciate my friends somewhat more. Even though I liked the support of the majority of the texts, I was also shocked by a lot of them.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's essay in Chapter 6, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," describes an entirely female Victorian world "in which hostility [toward] and criticism of other women" was not only uncommon, but considered unnatural and practically regarded as taboo.

Hawthorne’s novel is unique in that it represents two distinct time periods, as well as all that passes between, in terms of views of sexuality.  While he tells a tale of 17th century Puritanism, he writes from a 19th century perspective, and so woven into The Scarlet Letter, we have a composition of a changing society’s shifting ideas of sexuality.  The changes are often rooted in what, at any given time, is considered to be woman’s “nature.”  In her essay on passionlessness, Cott explores the vacillating opinions of sexuality and how it relates

One important issue that Hawthorne sheds light upon in The Scarlet Letter is the relationship between the public sphere and the private sphere and the general trends concerning the two in relation to sexuality and its deployment. This issue figures prominently in Hawthorne's portrayal of the Election Day festivities.

 As I was finishing up The Scarlet Letter, the only that the “A” came to stood for in my head was: asylum. The characters seemed to begin to go crazy in my eyes. At the age of only seven, Pearl began to question her mother’s intentions. Alone, this showed me that Hawthorne seemed to have an underlining meaning to all his characters, and that seemed to be that they are meant to be twisted and crazy.