A for 'Asylum' / Passionlessness
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. I began to be reminded of the book Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel where there was so much magical realism that it became hard to follow. I was not sure what to conceive as real and what was ultimately just Hawthorne’s symbolism. However, what I was able to notice was the undeniable connection between “passionlessness” written about in Cott’s essay and Hester’s character.
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A lot that Cott touches upon is the idea of women being the “property of men.” From the first look, it may not seem like Hester lies within those boundaries. However, this is untrue. Technically, she belongs to Chillingworth. Although they are no longer together because of her adultery, her life is tainted because of him and even Dimmesdale realizes this in Chapter 27. When Hester reveals to him that Chillingworth is her husband, he begins to blame her. After a while, however, Dimmesdake realizes that Chillingworth is the one to blame. Hester was young and naive when she married and was almost trapped. This chapter becomes less about the sin of adultery committed by Hester, but more about the vengefulness of Chillingworth.
The other most important part of The Scarlet Letter is the idea of divine authority. Hester refuses to take off the “A” on her chest even if she is allowed to. She believes that no human figure should remove it from her chest and that it will fall off when the time is right. She believes that divine authority can only take it off. This resembles the ideas of British Evangelicals that Cott writes about in her essay. She states that women were made for God’s purposes, or that at least that is what the Evangelicals believed. They thought women had greater piety, but were virtuous by nature. Most importantly, women were responsible for their own actions. This is a good explanation to why Hester never seemed ashamed of the crime she committed. She knew that it was her wrongdoing and therefore her consequences. She refused to leave Boston because she did not believe anyone else had the right to judge her actions. Who else could better understand her sin and punishment than the herself?
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Comments
Keshia, as you will see from
Keshia, as you will see from the other responses and comments, we discussed some of the issues you raised in class, especially the ways in which Cott's argument about passionlessness as a Victorian ideology is represented in the novel. We can see the elevation of purity at the end, for example. At the same time, we see her sanctioning her sensual/sexual nature--as a "consecration"--in ways that do not go along with this ideology and defy what the Evangelicals would say. So the novel brings together certain strong tensions of the time, which give it dramatic force.
I was interested in your observation about A for Asylum. What i gather you mean by this is that each character is acting out of the ordinary, or the acceptable, and that makes them appear "crazy." In many ways, that is how the townspeople might have seen them. Or, in Hester's case, they condemn her as willful, which can also be a dismissal of her akin to feminine "craziness." But remember Foucault on this--because he points out that such divisions between the normal and abnormal are integral to the deployment of sexuality and the rise of the medical regulatory system that divides and controls society. So, as analysts, we need to take into account when that is being portrayed so that we have greater insight into that investment of power, rather than readily accepting it ourselves.