Who Is Persecuted or Prosecuted for Deviance from Sexual Norms?

Who Is Persecuted or Prosecuted for Deviance from Sexual Norms?
In reading the documents on the role of sex and sexual structures in colonial New England, and the first part of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, what seems most striking is the role that accusations of sexual deviance and the persecution or prosecution of such played in colonial society:  it seemed that, in setting apart the sexual “deviant” in legal or religious prosecution, the goal of the society was not so much to point to “evil” or “sin” within the society, but to the impact of outsiders, of people  who act in sinful ways sexually, on the pure, religiously just and correct society that had been constructed.  It seemed the colonial leaders went to any and all measures to show that the “problem” of deviation from their sexual norms was not a problem from within their society, but of outsiders—people from without—acting against their society.
Puritan Plymouth had no place for any type of sin, much less a sin of the flesh, and it was hard for the leaders of that society to understand why anyone who would commit to crossing the ocean and joining the colony would ever act in such a way.  Witness William Bradford’s attempt at finding reasons why acts of “wickedness” were occurring in the Puritan colony:  he never attributes the cause of the “wickedness” to the Puritan settlers themselves, but rather, in his four possible reasons as to why same-sex acts and a case of bestiality occurred, he attributes the cause of sin to others who came to Plymouth with the Puritans but who were not Puritans themselves, such as those who came for profit, and servants; in any sense, he immediately creates an us-versus-them dichotomy, explaining away the sinful acts as those of a different group of people, a people who do not subscribe to Puritan beliefs (78).
Persecuting people who engage in acts outside of the sexual norms of colonial society then became a way for the society to define themselves in contrast to those outsiders who engage in “deviant” actions.  In Godbeer’s essay, the prosecution of upstanding members of colonial society known to engage in actions outside of the society’s sexual norms, such as same-sex acts, was avoided in many instances as this would upset carefully-balanced power relations in colonial New England.  Nicholas Sessions probably avoided prosecution so long because of his position in the town and, in his sentencing, his estate protected him from receiving corporal punishment (101).  As Godbeer writes, “intercourse, hierarchy, and power were closely intertwined,” (99).  To prosecute a well-regarded member of the town would be to show that a “problem” existed within “us”—the colonial society at large—and not as an attack brought over by outsiders.
Hester Prynne, of course, is just such an outsider, and so her trial and public punishment fit this us-versus-them narrative of morality and sexual deviance.  Hawthorne’s character is the wife of a learned man still in Amsterdam, maybe even dead now, recently arrived from that country, alone in this Puritan settlement of Massachusetts.   She is set apart as a deviant, an example of what the Puritans are not, and the leaders of the settlement are quite proud of themselves, as they have established a colony where sinfulness is put on display for all to see.  That she is the outsider is enforced by Hawthorne’s imagery, and her eventual home.  She may be persecuted because she is the other, enforcing the norms that create an “us”.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, Joseph Papa, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.