Men and Women Both Think the Other is Evil, Society has Double Standards about Sex…. News at 11
Men and Women Both Think the Other is Evil, Society has Double Standards about Sex…. News at 11
Cott’s essay on Victorian sexual ideologies clarified some of the themes and terms presented by The Scarlet Letter. As we discussed in last week’s class, adultery was only committed if the woman involved in the sexual activity was married. Married men could escape being labeled as adulterers as long as they did not have extramarital sex with another man’s wife. As stated in Cott’s essay, in that time period it was believed that women and men had similar “sexual appetites,” but women were held to a higher standard of morality and virtue than were men (133). Additionally, Cott states “the physical and biological consequences of sexual adventure also burdened women more heavily than men in an era lacking effective means to prevent conception or infection” (133).
The novel exemplifies the latter two points. Hester’s treatment is particularly harsh, she is branded and ostracized and there is much talk of her having given into her sin. And Hester is forever stuck with the consequences of her actions; since she was impregnated and known to be married she was therefore the one that was known as the adulterer. In theory, her partner could have escaped without facing consequences for his crime of passion with another man’s wife. It was Hester who suffered most of the consequences, but if she was held to a high standard of morality as a married woman, the minister was held to a higher standard than anyone else because of his position. He was believed to be a paragon of virtue, more good and holy than anyone else in the town, which was exemplified by the town’s speculations regarding his self-inflicted branding and claiming of Hester and Pearl.
More intriguing than the essay were the documents about male sexuality. Document 2 essentially states that men are supposed to protect women and their “peace, happiness, and honor,” but instead men betray and ruin women. As expected, the document laments the double standard, stating that men are essentially encouraged to continue committing sins while the women involved are harshly punished for one offense in which they were the victims. The document goes on to state that if women are by nature better than men before their “fall” and worse than men after, it must mean that women are inherently “more chaste, more pure and refined, and exalted” than men (112).
The ideas set forth by the document are interesting because they are exemplifying the Evangelical Protestant ideology that women are more virtuous than men. “Passionlessness” is exemplified because the document is all about the wrongs of the “licentious” male and there is not even the slightest reference to women’s sexual desire. The woman is cast as the victim, preyed upon by the bad man and a disgrace to her sex if she falls into his trap. Interestingly, document 3 was published less than 20 years later and was about nymphomania and casts the women with sexual thoughts and desires as “afflicted with this species of madness” and essentially evil (114). As women wrote document 2, unsurprisingly, men wrote document 3.
Tags: adultery, affliction, consequences, evil, fall, Hester Prynne, madness, morality, nymphomania, religion, Victorian, virtue
March 8th, 2010 at 9:51 am
Jaslee,
This is a good discussion of the shifts taking place in the 19th century and the points of contention occurring between various moral reformers. It shows how the deployment of sexuality was not uniform in its practice, but rather, as Foucault points out, a matter of debate within networks of power.
For class discussion, think about the women reformers and those described in Cott’s essay as examples of “reverse discourse.” How do these examples clarify the way resistances operate within power relations?