Beyond the law
This week’s selections of readings played off each really well. From the historical excerpt of Massachusetts’s colony’s laws on sexual offenses, the overarching message is death is result of any sexual deviances away from heterosexual and martial sex in colonial America. However, that is not always the case (or even rarely the case) as evident in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and in the case studies in Richard Godbeer’s “Sodomy in Colonial New England.” In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne was convicted of being an adulteress, but escaped the law’s prescribed punishment of death (Peiss, 71 & Hawthorne, 47). Similarly, Nicholas Sension from colonial Connecticut was never put to death for over three decades of attempted sodomy or how other colonial men managed to survive legally in their communities despite sodomitic reputations (Godbeer, 101-103). As proposed by Foucault, power is not simply the law or “juridico-discursive.”
The Scarlet Letter is fictional and I acknowledge that there is a need for Hester Prynne to live for the dynamic between her, Pearl, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth in this tale (though I have no idea how this ends since I somehow managed to go through middle school and high school without this novel being assigned to me). However, it is plausible that the decision to use Hester as a symbol of the consequences of deviation from God and law in the town as Godbeer pointed out that colonists preferred informal measures to “the expensive and intractable legal system” (103). Other than the informal “legal” system, other power relations were in play for Hester’s situation such as Dimmesdale’s input to the Governor that prevented Pearl being taken away from Hester (minster-magistrate relation, father-daughter relation, adulterer-adulteress relation, etc…). Another interesting thing I noticed was how Hester was able to support herself as a skillfully distinguished seamstress (Hawthorne, 76) As a single mother and as the sole breadwinner of her two-person household, this questioning of gender roles and patriarchy is probably also another relation that contributed to Hester’s isolation.
As for a true historical example, the case study of Nicolas Sension comes with an interesting set of force relations beyond the law, which states that sodomy is punished by death. First, there is the fluid interpretation of sodomy by magistrates (in the case of Sension, sodomy was defined by penetration and the need for two witnesses) and then there are the favored informal measures of law (Godbeer 97-98). As a recurring theme in Godbeer’s piece is that the view of sodomy in law and the colonial American public’s view of sodomy is different. The law stresses the act while the public was edging toward an identity of a sodomite and sometimes there is even indifference in the public (Godbeer, 94, 103-104). In addition, Sension was a man of high social standing and was popular with the townspeople (Godbeer 101). He was the one of the wealthiest landowners and interesting, the people of his affection were younger and of lower class (Godbeer 99). All these forces beyond the law contributed to the situation Sension ended up with: able to attempt sodomy for three decades and only formally trialed once (Godbeer 93).
Tags: Godbeer, Power, Power-Relations, The Scarlet Letter
