Cott vs. The Scarlet Letter
To me, the document in chapter 4 entitled “Boston Female Moral Reformers Condemn ‘Licentious Men’” reads as an introduction to an early 19th century version of “He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut” by Jessica Valenti. Valenti’s book outlines double standards that we live by as men and women, specifically ones that appear in social and sexual arenas. The Friend of Virtue document reads: “Do you say the guilty [women, in a case of adultery] deserve to suffer and must expect it? Granted. But why not let a part of this suffering fall on the destroyer [man]?” This is touched upon in Valenti’s book – the fact that a woman who commits adultery is shamed and disgraced but that the man involved doesn’t face the same stigmatization. In essence, he’s a stud, and she’s a slut. Cott mentions in her essay’s contexualization of New England’s views towards women’s sexuality in Early America that “a wife’s adultery was always cause for her husband to divorce her, but wives had little success in freeing themselves from unfaithful husbands” (Peiss 133).
Also, in the address to mothers, wives, sisters and daugters, the speaker urges all the women to withhold their sex from those licentious men in order to weed them out of virtuous society – which echoes the interpretation of women’s perceived sexuality during this time as shifting from a literal thing to be controlled to something much more connected with morality and decision-making, value and temperament. Sexual control was elevated to the highest rung of the morality ladder and female chastity became “the archetype for human morality.” (Peiss 133)
In “Passionlessness”, the author argues for the theory that women were constructed as passionless in that time period in order to “exaggerat[e]…sexual propriety so far as to immobilize women and, on the other hand, allow[…] claims of women’s moral influence to obfuscate the need for other sources of power.” (Peiss 141). However, the majority of the narrative in chapter 18 of The Scarlet Letter is written in a more sensual, even sexualized way, especially in the description of Hester as she reunites with Dimmesdale and reconciles with him. I know that focusing on one particular chapter of one particular book is no way to disprove/discredit someone else’s interpretation, but I just found the contrasts striking. From the first description of Hester’s mouth and smile as playful and radiant, and onwards, the tone of this chapter becomes more sensually written. The descriptions of Hester’s physical beauty flowing forth – metaphors that evoke images from nature, such as rivers flowing, light gushing, sunshine pouring – are just as evocative as Hawthorne’s writing in the first half of the novel, but also bursting forth with sexual tension – to me, at least.
Another interpretation of this might be one that doesn’t analyze this dissonance in ideas as conflicting, but complementary. There is an analysis in Cott’s essay that navigates the sexually virtuous identity as one that “connoted only demure behavior”, not necessarily true passionlessness. “Indeed, the underlying theme that women had to appeal to men turned modesty into a sexual ploy, emphasizing women’s sex objectification.” (Peiss 134) If one saw an increase in emotional, metaphorical writing that evoked an between-the-lines interpretation as sexual in Hawthorne’s chapter 18, it could be explained and viewed through that lens. The weight of the “A” lifted from her shoulders, Hester’s true beauty begins to bring light back into the forest, literally, reviving the flora and affecting the fauna.
