Sexuality and American Culture

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 to women.  Sexuality is a difficult concept to pin down (as we can tell from our class) and one best described and understood as a dynamic complex of ideas.
    Let’s begin with Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne.  She is an amalgam of all that is right and wrong, positive and negative in woman’s “nature.”  She is beautiful and elegant, skilled with the needle, and is a devoted mother.  But at the same time she is a passionate sinner, who, in a weak and shameful moment, committed adultery and sealed her fate as a woman fallen from grace.  As I discussed in last week’s response, Hester represents both sides of the devoted mother-hysterical woman binary.
In the second half of the novel, more is revealed of the narrator’s opinions regarding women and sexuality.  In discussing the illicit relations between Hester and Dimmesdale, we are told that it had been “a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose” (Ch.18).  This remark certainly indicts passion as the perpetrator of the crime, and meets the expectations of early colonists, as Cott characterizes them:  “the New England colonists expected women’s sexual appetites to be comparable with men’s, if not greater…” (Peiss ed., 133).  Cott continues by saying that “in a society in which women’s sProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 ual nature was considered primary and their social autonomy was slight,”  “Puritan theology weakened, but did not destroy the double standard of sexual morality.”  So within the novel’s Puritan setting, Hester’s sin of passion makes sense.
According to Cott, Hawthorne’s later perspective should bring us chastity and sexual morality---Christian values---as adopted by or applied to women.  In the 18th century and beyond, purity, not passion, is deemed to be the nature of woman, and therefore passionlessness, as a female quality and possibly a tool, results.  In fact, we see the tension between the two views of feminine nature at the very end of the novel’s conclusion:
Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophethess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin…The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful…
The narrator projects onto Hester the understanding that as a woman who had sinned in passion, is no longer qualified to guide others.  She is “stained with sin” and therefore antithetical to a better woman, a real woman, one who is pure.
    Again, we have Hester as an alien woman, an enigmatic female.  She who is gentle and lovely and caring to her daughter (and to others) is invalidated as a woman.  Her sin is a scarlet mark on the womanly whiteness of her soul.  She who lives out her sentence free from passion is forever scarred by her passionate mistake.