+1 862 207 3288 Rereading Women: Hester Prynne-Ism and the Scarlet Mob of Scribblers
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. Rereading Women: Radicalism
For more than 140 years, readers and critics have examined Nathaniel Hawthorne’s radicalism. Those who find him most
radical point to his irony and his romancer’s love of “deception and concealment” (Bell, “Arts” 41), even to his protodeconstruc-
tivism (Lloyd-Smith)-or they claim as evidence Hester Prynne’s stoic dignity, antinomian rebelliousness, nonconformity, or her
“powerfully transgressive free-thinking” and “powers of moral reimagination” (Brodhead, School 43). Hawthorne’s subversive
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The primary way in which male mainstream
Hawthorne scholarship has Othered women has been in its almost total disregard of women’s
scholarship on The Scarlet Letter.
side, as described by Michael Davitt Bell, is part of the ro- mancer’s identity as one who is “in opposition to the most basic norms
of society: reason, fact, and ‘real’ business” (“Arts” 37); in fact, Bell argues that Hawthorne goes further than this kind of
societal opposition, rejecting even Jeffersonian “reason and fact, plain and unadorned” (qtd. in “Arts” 39). Bell thus agrees with
Nina Baym’s claim that “the romance originated as an ex- pression of [Hawthorne’s] own feelings of social defiance and dis- content
.. .” (Shape 146). Baym even names Hawthorne a femi- nist (“Thwarted Nature”).’
Many of these critics who argue for Hawthorne’s radicalism see themselves among those who oppose the received beliefs of the status
quo (the “acquired knowledge” that Melville too re- jected). Some call themselves the “New Americanists” (see Pease, “New”). For
Jonathan Arac, Hawthorne’s radicalism is apparent and relevant because of the radical interpreter: “… we must value the hope he
offers in his openness to our interpretive energies but must recognize his own limitations within a ‘frame- work’ ” (259).
Despite their professed radicalism, these critics of The Scar-
let Letter have remained conservative in their relationship to
women-both to Hester Prynne as a metaphoric representation of a white American woman and to women scholars and critics
who have also written about this text. These male scholars and
critics have continued the limiting, sexist cultural practice of Othering anyone whose difference calls tradition into question. The
primary way in which male mainstream Hawthorne scholar- ship has Othered women has been in its almost total disregard of women’s
scholarship on The Scarlet Letter.
A decade ago Joyce Warren argued that “[l]ike the legend- ary Narcissus, the American individualist focused on his own image to such
an extent that he could grant little reality to oth- ers” (4), and more recently Pam Morris has theorized in support of this
insight: “. .. by seeing women as other to themselves, as not-men, men can read into ‘femininity’ whatever qualities are needed to
construct their sense of the masculine. So, a mythi- cized ‘Woman’ becomes the imaginary location of male dreams, idealizations, and
fears: throughout different cultures ‘feminin- ity’ is found to represent nature, beauty, purity and goodness, but also evil,
enchantment, corruption and death” (14). Men’s self-legitimizing, yet un(self)conscious, cultural tendency toward Othering, I argue,
has determined the male critical relationships both to Hester Prynne and to women’s scholarship. In this essayI draw on a
particular, pervasive way of Othering women-the decidedly nonradical, deeply mythicized, cultural economy of
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198 Rereading Women
what I call “Hester Prynne-ism”-to contextualize my rereading of some of the practices and conclusions of mainstream literary
scholarship on The Scarlet Letter, which has replicated rather than resisted the culture’s relationship to women.
As Julia Kristeva and others have argued, texts and cultural economies (like Hester Prynne-ism) contain “the excess of mean- ing
that constantly threatens to disrupt the boundaries of these defined identities and expose the fiction of any imposed ‘truth’ ”
(Morris 138). Recontextualizations and rereadings can help to reveal these fictions, which are based in the status quo’s depen-
dence on received beliefs about women, running the gamut from Hester Prynne-ism to fear-based perceptions that women are taking over
the academy, when, in fact, the prominence of a few women has substituted for, rather than enhanced, women’s posi- tions in the
academy.2
This essay’s concern for Hawthorne’s novel, its body of
scholarship, and academic practices helps to reveal the Hester
Prynne-ism imposed on academic women. Such a rereading
demonstrates that exclusion and Othering are part of the beliefs
which influence, even determine, our literary scholarship. Unless
our institutions and their practices are thus reread in various
contexts that question rather than blindly support them, then
whatever progress or change occurs will be as conditional and
easily erasable as the scholarship of generations of women has been.
2. Rereading Women: Hester Prynne-ism
The Scarlet Letter has often been taught as a moral text in high school and university classrooms in the US, with Hester Prynne as
the scarlet (white) woman and adulteress who serves as a cultural warning to girls and women and therefore functions as part of
their social conditioning. Darrel Abel articulates the warning when he moralizes about Hester’s “moral inadequacy” and “moral
dereliction” (181, 187). Hester Prynne has also been seen as an American heroine-self-punishing, maintaining the separation of the
private from the public, and suffering in silence. Her few “noisy” moments-in the prison after her hours on the scaffold and during
her impassioned plea for Pearl at the gover- nor’s-are met, in the first case, with drugs (sinisterly adminis- tered by
Chillingworth) and, in the second case, with admon- ishments about her moral responsibilities to Pearl. Her final “noise”-in the
forest-is appropriated by Dimmesdale and used as energy for his last two performances (his sermon and
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American Literary History 199
200 Rereading Women
confession)-an “almost vampirish transfer of energy” (Person 134).3
Yet in fact, fiction, criticism, and culture, no woman has been viewed as more continuously desirable to white men than one who,
like Hester Prynne, is beautiful, strong, silent, self- regulating, (hetero)sexual, and subversively sinful enough to break the
sexual codes with men who (like Dimmesdale) will also break the codes, as long as they are not held publicly account- able. This
American relationship to and representation of the “scarlet Woman”-as good and bad, as desirable because she is physically beautiful
and sexually transgressive but also in need of warning, punishment, and instruction-has been translated into various versions of
Hester Prynne, as in, for example, even the supposedly wholesome musical The Music Man:
I smile, I grin when the gal With a touch of sin walks in.
I hope, I pray, for Hester To win just one more “A.”
Playboy articulates this male desire in one of the many cartoons about Hester; this one foregrounds Hester’s sinful nature as it
“depicts [Hester] at the head of a bevy of Puritan lasses”: “Beam- ing smugly and proudly, Hester sports an A+ on her bosom while
all her companions have just simple A’s” (8). These allu- sions appeared in the publication of the Nathaniel Hawthorne society as if
to show that Hawthorne’s influence is alive and well.
However, a new film version of The Scarlet Letter (1995), which stars Demi Moore, rewrites Hester Prynne-ism by exposing sexual
objectification and violence in its representation of the Puritan community’s fear of (and desire for) Hester, and of rape and
sexual abuse, including the process by which women were accused of witchcraft and brutally interrogated and indicted. Thus, in this
case, it is not the film version or translation of Hes- ter Prynne which reinscribes male desire, as so many films have, but the
reviews, which nostalgically cry out for the “real” Hester of Hawthorne’s text-the beautiful, but silent one. Most of the critics
focus on Moore’s chest and body, oblivious to the film’s refusal to rehumiliate Hester Prynne.
This brief description of the pervasive context of Hester Prynne-ism allows for a significant kind of answer to questions about why
women’s scholarship on The Scarlet Letter has been so disregarded. Mainstream scholarship has generally interpreted Prynne as
sexually transgressive and thus morally inadequate and/or defeminized-“Some attribute had departed from her,
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the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman” (Hawthorne 174)-or as sexually transgressive and thus desirable
and/or politically radical. In this cultural and academic confusion, which is related to received beliefs about and desire for
transgressive women, Hester Prynne continues to function paradoxically as both a moralizing warning and radical model, especially
directed at women and feminists who choose not to act fully in terms of their social conditioning and who practice what is viewed by
the culture and the academy as problematic (even abhorrent), noisy politics.4
