Defining illicit in the deployment of alliance
I know I’m bringing up the rear with the third post of the week, but hopefully I can add to Sam and Richard’s discussion on act vs. identity by discussing the deployment of alliance – specifically, the duality of licit vs. illicit acts.
Although, as Professor Quinby mentioned, Hawthorne is writing from a mid-19th century mindset, The Scarlet Letter ostensibly takes place within the pre-18th century deployment of alliance, “a system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties…built around a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit” (Foucault 106). The code of laws governing sexual offenses in Massachusetts from 1641-1660 is a clear example of such a set of rules. Civil laws, however, were not solely responsible for regulating sexual practices. According to Foucault, canonical law and Christian pastoral law also determined the distinction between licit and illicit acts (37). Nonetheless, all three codes were predominantly concerned with governing the “regular” sexuality of marital relations; regulations against other kinds of sexuality “remained a good deal more confused” (Foucault 37).
By the latter half of the 17th century, New England ministers were already starting to differentiate between different kinds of sexual offenses. In 1673, Samuel Danforth separated “fornication” (sex with single women, adultery, incest, and masturbation) from “going after strange sex,” which included sodomy and bestiality (Godbeer 95). In 1704, Samuel Willard made a similar distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” kinds of “unlawful and prohibited mixtures” (Godbeer 95). Foucault credits this shift in the deployment of alliance to the “discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” which produced a new dichotomy between licit and illicit, “on the one hand infractions against the legislation (or morality) pertaining to marriage and the family, and on the other, offenses against the regularity of a natural function” (38, 39). This change, in turn, set the stage for Scientia sexualis and the deployment of sexuality, which is characterized by the normal vs. abnormal dichotomy.
Hester’s story takes place just prior to the shift away from strict legal governance of heterosexual marital relations towards defining and controlling other types of sexual conduct. Thus, it makes sense that in the early 1600’s, Hester’s adultery would be considered a crime more serious (and, with a resulting pregnancy, easier to prove) than even repeated accusations of “sodomy” (ambiguously defined and seldom sufficiently witnessed) against otherwise upstanding members of New England communities like Sension or Gorton.
Tags: Ariana, Foucault, reading responses, The Scarlet Letter
