Sacrifice for Power

Last week, Professor Quinby reminded us that there is a dual authorship within the Scarlet letter: We must remember that we are being retold a puritan story from the perspective of a mid 19th-century Victorian infused narrator. The perspective of our narrator is just as important to understanding the modes of Victorian belief, and through the descriptions and transformations of Hester, or the subtle assumptions that the Narrator makes, we can infer ideologies that are reflective of Victorian values in regard to women, especially the role of passionlessness and self-control. The understanding of Cott’s article, which discusses the creation of the passionlessness women in the Victorian era and how it both empowered and exploited the physicality and moral complex of women, illuminates the role of Hester in a multiplicity of ways as both an individual of power and a victim to a new restrictive role.

It is evident even in the first chapter of our assigned readings that the view of Hester has transformed from the passionate, promiscuous, sinful woman to one that Cott describes as “passionlessness…to replace that sexual/carnal characterization of a women with a spiritual/moral one, allowing women to develop their human faculties and their self-esteem” (139). The narrator describes Hester’s scarlet letter no longer as a punishment, or a “badge of shame” (111) but a “symbol of her calling”(111) that represented a “Sister of Mercy”(111). People no longer saw the scarlet letter as one that ostracized and restricted but an entity that created and provided: “Such helpfulness was found in her that many people refused to interpret the Scarlet A by its original signification. They said it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength” (111). This transformation of passionate sinner to moral figure what Cott argues to give women the power to acquire moral superiority, but also “exaggerating sexual propriety so far as to immobilize woman and, on the other, by allowing claims of women’s moral influence to obfuscate the need for other sources of power” (141).
However, as Cott suggests, Assigning Hester as the role of the passionlessness, respectful and harmless figure is not a simple one-sided victory. Instead, the narrator describes Hester to be engulfed by the Symbol one that represents strength and dignity: “All the light and grateful foliage of her character had been withered up by his red-hot brand, and long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline… her rich, luxuriant hair had either been cut off or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine…nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection” (112). Not only does Hester become someone who is incapable of passion, she is no longer a woman! According to the narrator, for reasons of self-preservation: “if she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her—or crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more” (112) Hester has become a static being, waiting for the “magic touch to effect the transfiguration” (112). The magic touch is foreshadowing the later scene in which when Hester and Dimmesdale are both in the forest and the passion is once more reignited. The narrator writes: “The scarlet letter had not done its office,” (114) to reveal that the scarlet letter, before as a symbol of jurisdictional and religious law, has become a symbol that instead surveillances Hester and destroys the passionate and “healthy throb” of her heart. Her behavior is “modified…[becoming] a long hereditary habit” (114) where she can only speculate and keep to herself the thoughts that ultimately inhibit her sexuality.

A Foucualtian analysis may categorize Hester’s newfound power as a demonstration of Reverse Discourse, a way of Hester to grab the reigns of power relations and use it for her advantage. Cott realizes this to conclude that “The assertion of moral integrity within passionlessness had allowed woman to retrieve their identity from a trough of sexual vulnerability and dependence. The concept could not assure women full autonomy—but what transformation in sexual ideology alone could have done so?” (141). Though Hester could have utilized this moral integrity to gain advantages, we have to remember that in the Victorian era, where power relations are still strongly tethered to religious and jurisdictional institutions and the deployment of the multiplicity of discourse are just beginning to seep through societies, practicing passionlessness did not grant Hester power without sacrifice.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 at 12:55 am and is filed under Richard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.