First Rays

“The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed…”

Like a tremor shaking its way from the depths of Earth’s trenches before splitting the surface in two, or a storm that swirls unheard from up the coastline in all the epochs before radar, the retrospective observer can feel the force of women’s sexuality thrashing against its strictures in the writing of mid-nineteenth century New England. Reform in education, diversification of religious practices and norms, and spectral cause of liberty so central to the American project inspired many to take a fresh view of right relations between the sexes. From women’s groups, to iconoclast male doctors, to activists like H. B. Stowe and to writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, the cause of women’s rights began to be taken up from many different corners of civil society, with many different ends in mind.

Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, a landmark of American letters in its scope and its style, might also lay claim to breaking ground in its reevaluation of a former cultural ethic. Hawthorne holds the terrifying capacity for judgment (and manipulation of the judged) that was an organizing principle in patriarchal Puritan society to the lens of the new scientia sexualis. Hester’s narrative again and again demonstrates the subjective nature of truth, of guilt, and of forgiveness, as Hawthorne reinvests these qualities into a woman whom her contemporary masters had (certainly attempted) to leave bereft. But in the fervor of a cultural transformation, Hawthorne’s book now reads as a relic for the new mindset that was dawning on America as well as a story of feminine awakening. This is substantiated in the relics Peiss includes in Chapter Four of M.P.A.S.

Demonstrated in these documents, we find a growing recognition that female sexuality has been neglected and abused by the dominant male force for too long. The onus of responsibility for transforming the situation is, however, placed upon the female herself or the scientized male authority figure (the doctor, teacher, or statesman), and not upon society itself (which was, of course, still living with the deep contradiction of being based upon human liberty in a slave-holding nation). In fact, it is the comforts of modern life that lead to the rare but deadly nymphomania, as one Boston doctor would have it. “You know how I feel about featherbeds,” he proclaims, denigrating them and other supposed luxuries (including flavorful food and warm baths) as the provocations for a hysterical uterus. If woman were to remain to remain pure, this logic goes, than she would need remain free of the corruptions that have been innovated for her by men. Any ‘modern woman’ is a guilty (or, as increasingly became the language, unwell) as the rest of us.

And so Hester, saintly as she might seem, cannot be the one thanks to her burdens of this world. She saw “the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow.” Perhaps Hawthorne made the full leap, and did indeed create a prophetess in the body of a scorned sinner, and stepped back for the sake of his time. But his times mark a key passage in the history of sexuality, when a woman’s body became a matter of public debate and institutional ‘protection’; women would not be repressed by theocratic Law alone any longer, but by scientific Reason, and would remain so till a longed-for ideal feminine emerged at last to overtake the order of men.