Passionlessness as a Sacrificial Tool of Subversion
In Puritan society, women are compelled to sin through their passion. Hester, losing all passion, in one ironic sense loses her ties to sin. She learns power over herself, and power to define her own code of ethics. This, as Lee pointed out, is distinct from the biblical code of morality that rules Puritan society. Hester learns to exist outside of the law. She physically lives on the outskirts of the village, but she also lives just outside of the strictures of morality. Becoming endlessly helpful to so many members of the society that shunned her, she develops a breed of power over herself and in society. This power is accurately described by Cott: “Both women’s participation in the creation of Victorian sexual standards and the place of passionlessness in the vanguard of feminist thought deserve more recognition. The serviceability of passionlessness to women in gaining social and familial power should be acknowledged as a primary reason the ideology was quickly and widely accepted” (Cott 140).
When Hester takes off her scarlet letter in the forest with Dimmesdale and lets her hair down, she is giving up the power that her external position in society had lent her. She becomes a passionate woman once again, and foregoes that power that Cott described. Her passionlessness, which had formerly given her the ability to live by her own set of ethics and to gain some semblance of respect from other members of society (though she didn’t much care about that), was now replaced by her former passion that had caused her downfall in the first place.
Throughout this whole interaction, Pearl is eerily aware of all of the dynamics and power relations tied up with her mother’s shifting identity. She does not know her mother without the scarlet letter. She does not know her mother’s passion. I interpreted the scene as Pearl being uncomfortable with her mother’s sudden loss of her passionlessness-power. She saw her mother momentarily subjugated to Dimmesdale, and it frightened her. In this scene Pearl is described as being the visible symbol of Hester and Dimmesdale’s union. Both their union in sin, and their union in love. As the scarlet letter Hester wears on her chest is a symbol of both her misery and of her newfound power, Pearl also represents the positive aspects of Hester and Dimmesdale’s care for each other, and the negative aspects of their mutual sin and descent into senseless and profane passion.
The story ends with Hester sacrificing her sexuality for an ability to move freely through society and act according to her own ethics. Like Cott describes with the passionless Victorian woman, the emphasis is shifted from her sexuality to her morality. By the end of the book, when people have found an awe and reverence in her scarlet letter, she has come to occupy a very different position in this Puritan village. Women who were dealing with issues stemming from their sinful passion came to her for counsel, as she had successfully risen above, or sacrificed her passion for a more mobile role in society. She has in a sense circumvented the Puritan deployment of sexuality and created her own role as a passionless women, and thus expanded the vocabulary of discourse available to the society.
Tags: feminism, passion, Passionlessness, sin, Victorian
February 25th, 2013 at 8:46 pm
Hi Eli,
This is a strong and persuasively written post, combining the historical circumstances of both Puritan and Victorian eras, Cott’s analysis of the ideology of passionlessness, and your own insightful application of those to the novel. One caution–historical Puritanism is more in keeping with the system of Alliance but Hawthorne’s fictional version of it represents Puritans more in keeping with his own era’s emergence of the deployment of sexuality. For class it would be helpful to us for you to consider this complexity through Dimmesdale–when he stands on the scaffold at the end, which system is he most in keeping with, Alliance or Sexuality?
February 26th, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Thank for this post, Eli, and the clarity it offers on the dual roles of the letter. I find myself fascinated by the contradiction offered in assessing Hester’s ‘A’ as a symbol of her strength, and wonder what this device offers as we study the emergence of deployed sexuality as opposed to alliance. Is it this nod to twofold possibility, of guilt and innocence, virgin and whore, that signifies the transition into modern sexuality? Without the letter, Hester is just a woman (with all of the potency that includes), but with it she is something else, an avatar of guilt redeemed and an alluring female who lives utterly apart from the sexual context of her community.