Robert Azzarello
Hawthorne’s Puritans: Discourse, Discipline, and the Function of Space
in The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) begins and ends in two powerful places – the prison and the cemetery – that not only frame the story of Hester Prynne, the Puritan adulteress of 1630s Boston, but also reveal the importance of space within all social life. At the beginning of the novel, the reader sees Hester exiting the prison; at the end, she is entering the cemetery. By employing this spatial framing device, Hawthorne forces the reader to consider the role of place within the entire narrative structure. Considering the specific places of the prison and the cemetery as “practical necessities,” Hawthorne begins to illustrate the ways in which all places function in society. He writes, “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (45). According to Hawthorne, an essential part of building this totalitarian “Utopia” is a careful consideration of the production and function of space. We already see in the “practical necessities” of the prison and the cemetery how places become physical manifestations of imaginative cultural practices that have, or are supposed to have, powerful influences on human thought and behavior. In other words, places are built to perpetuate the ideologies of their builders.
In this essay I will argue that in The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne constructs a “map” of the totalitarian society of his Puritans. Examining the link between places and power, he creates a world that highlights the complex play and constant tension between places and people, between the production, disruption, and reproduction of places, and between the discourses of sin and sexuality and the manifestations of those discourses in space.
Mapping The Scarlet Letter
In preparing this “map” of The Scarlet Letter, I would like to look at three separate places that Hester Prynne occupies, or rather, is forced to occupy, at different times and in different ways: the scaffold, her cabin, and the natural spaces that encompass the city, specifically, the forest and the ocean. I will focus on these three places, but I will necessarily address other places since each place within the text can only exist in relation to other places. Places become dependent upon other places not only for their ability to signify, but also for their ability to position the subject. In the totalitarian environment of The Scarlet Letter, geography and discourse work together to both center and marginalize Hester’s body based upon her sin and sexuality.
I will begin with the narrator’s description of the scaffold in order to illustrate the centrality of this device in the spatial organization of Puritan Boston. Hawthorne writes that the scaffold:
constituted a portion of a penal machine, which […] was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. (52)
The scaffold perfectly illustrates the exercise of power through space. It is purely a social construction; there is nothing inherently humiliating in standing on a scaffold, even though the scaffold is also the place of the pillory. Although Hester is not subjected to the bodily constrictions of the pillory, the position of her body is manipulated to display her sin by holding her baby, Pearl. Instead of her arms extended out and up as they would in the pillory, they are folded around the baby. The baby becomes the physical sign of her sinful behavior, just as the pillory would have if that were her sentence. But how does the place of the scaffold work to produce this type of humiliation and shame? Why and in what ways does the scaffold signify sin? True, the place is a purely cultural construction both physically and metaphorically, but the question remains about how it, as a place, controls human subjects after it has been humanly constructed, or rather, while it is being humanly constructed. Constructions of place are always “in process/on trial,” to borrow Julia Kristeva’s term.
Tim Cresswell’s notion of “appropriateness” unpacks this process of signification by explaining the ways in which place simultaneously both is constructed by human subjects and constructs those subjects. As he explains, the “practice” of a particular behavior in a particular place produces a set of beliefs about what is the “appropriate” behavior in that place. That place, in turn, “reproduces the beliefs that produce it in a way that makes them appear natural, self-evident, and commonsense” (16). He gives the example of the “practice” of “appropriateness” in a library: “We are silent in a library because we believe that it is appropriate to be silent in libraries, and by being silent in libraries we contribute to the continuation of silence” (16). Following Cresswell, we can say that Hester is humiliated on the scaffold because both she and her eager audience believe that it is appropriate to be humiliated on a scaffold. She, then, perpetuates and reinforces this belief because she acts, and presumably feels, humiliated. Hester’s place on the scaffold signifies sin because she acts within a specific context, that is, the place of the scaffold. Her sin is performative – the audience is able to read her and she is able to read herself because of her physical position within an ideological place.
When Hester enters the physical scaffold, she also enters into a metaphorical space, an “instrument of discipline” in which she must endure “the public gaze” for three hours. The purpose of this metaphorical space, according to Hawthorne’s Puritans, is the “promotion of good citizenship,” yet the scaffold scene does something more; it initiates Hester into a social position within which she must remain for the rest of her life. In this scene of “pornographic excitement” (Herbert 117), the scaffold, the audience, and Hester come together in a precise and rehearsed process of signification. On the scaffold, Hester becomes the sinful adulteress of Puritan society. The place of the scaffold and the discourse of sin and sexuality join forces to literally create Hester Prynne at that exact moment. Moreover, Hester emerges as a hyper-visible object of both desire and disgust, pleasure and pain.
The description of Hester’s cabin further illustrates the effects of this initial positioning of Hester on the scaffold:
On the outskirts of the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. […] In this little, lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the license of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitional watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot. (73)
In effect, Hester’s cabin is an extension of the place of the scaffold. Although we see Hester removed to the margins of the city and placed under perpetual surveillance, the question of her choice here is essential. The statement that “Hester established herself” suggests something other than a passive relocation. In this self-reflexive construction, Hester becomes both the subject and the object of the action. Hawthorne seems to contradict himself by juxtaposing “inquisitional watch” and “Hester establishes herself.” But these spatial strategies of power work because they allow Hester some agency, even if that agency is ultimately governed by the authorities. While this phrase seems to give Hester the power over her own life, it is the magistrates and their “inquisitional watch” that play an enormous role in the ways in which Hester “establishes” herself.
The consequence of this marginalization is a “mystic shadow of suspicion”; yet that “mystic shadow” is in fact a rational and planned effect of the Puritan’s system of discipline and punishment. By mystifying a thoroughly rational and explicable cultural activity, Hawthorne constructs his own theoretics of space: the most effective gestures of power are not only those that we cannot see, but also those that have an apparently extra-human origin. According to Hawthorne, Puritan culture produces Hester’s physical and metaphysical place, then erases any evidence of its involvement in that production. Thus the relationship between place and power should be one of invisibility if it truly is to be effective. When space is seen as a mere backdrop for independent human action, it is disarmed in certain ways; it is removed from ideology. The apparent invisibility of that exertion of power through space grants those processes even greater power.
Natural places surround the town of Boston and they function in two ways – as the physical borders of the town and as the metaphorical borders of civilization, god, and humanity. These borders serve an ideological purpose to delineate and control sin and other effects of subversive citizenship. When Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale, the man with whom she committed adultery, meet in the forest, they are able to acknowledge their feelings for each other because, as Hawthorne writes, “Such was the sympathy of Nature – that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth – with the bliss of these two sprits!” (177). The forest is uncivilized and godless, but it is also sympathetic precisely because of its distance from civilization and god. Although Hester and Dimmesdale find some solace in the forest, even that place is not far enough from civilization in both physical and metaphysical distance. Speaking of the scarlet letter “A” that she is forced to wear, Hester says, “The forest cannot hide it! The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!” (184). Here, Hester is relying not only on the ocean, but the mid-ocean presumably between America and Europe, to hide the sign of her sin.
Hester believes in a direct correlation between physical and metaphorical places, assuming that the physically further she gets from the Puritans, the metaphorically further she will get from her adultery. Unfortunately for Hester, however, this is not the case – one cannot escape culture so easily. Later Hawthorne writes that the sea “heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law” (203). Qualifying this regulation by saying “hardly any attempts at regulation,” Hawthorne asks his readers to consider how culture does attempt to regulate this “natural” space. Part of this regulation consists of a “gendering” of space. Men and women have different roles to play in those “natural” places that are supposed to be outside of culture. Men can occupy that “lawless” ocean, while women cannot. Furthermore, men have the ability to move through space and change physical and metaphorical places much more easily than women. Hawthorne writes, “The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land” (203). The “appropriate” behavior of a man at sea is, of course, not the “appropriate” behavior of that man on land. Moreover, the ocean opens that possibility of movement for men, while closing that possibility for women. While appearing to provide an escape for Hester, the forest and the ocean are, instead, just more spaces of social control.
In each of these places (the scaffold, Hester’s cabin, and “natural” spaces), we see both materiality and metaphor at work – each place is simultaneously a literal and figurative location. Yet, in order to understand Hester’s place within her community more fully, we must look in more general terms at both the fluidity of these positions and the ambivalence of her reception in the Puritan community. Foucault proposes that discipline “individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations” (146). As such, Hester is distributed and circulated around her Puritan village; however, this distribution and circulation is extremely complex because Hester is both separate from and integral part to the Puritan community. At one point, Hawthorne maintains that she does not belong: “In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed that she was banished” (76). Yet, just before this statement, he insists that she does belong, but only as she serves a specific social function: “giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of women’s frailty and sinful passion” (71). This ambivalence indicates Hester’s dual function as both center and margin located within real and imagined places.
This ambivalence continues throughout the novel. At one point Hawthorne compares Hester to a ghost, writing that Hester “stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt” (76). Although Hester does occupy a separate place from her community, this complete ghost-like separation from the community is not completely true. A page later Hawthorne writes:
Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath with a smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. (77)
As a “text of the discourse,” Hester’s body becomes “the locus of public scrutiny” (Elbert 268) through a process of placement and interpretation. Hawthorne’s comparison of Hester to a ghost, however, does suggest some physical and metaphysical distance between Hester as text and her interpreters. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon suggests that a ghost is both a negative force (something missing) and a positive force (something present). She writes, “The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure” (8). Hester, too, takes on this double position. She is not merely (morally) dead, but she is also a prominent social figure – she is very much a positive force in her Puritan town.
After leaving Boston for many years, Hester returns and resumes her place “of her own free will” because “Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to her penitence” (227). She assures the women that “at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” (227). Now her marginality takes on even greater importance. Hester now not only counsels other women with a similar fate, but she also acts as a quasi-prophet for a quasi-feminist vision. Although Hawthorne demonstrates his confusion of this “new truth” by deferring his meaning with many commas and much providential time, he is certain, at least, that now is definitely not the time for this “mutual happiness.”
In the end, the discrepancy between the Puritan’s placement of Hester in society and Hester’s understanding of her place is resolved. Hester, by way of Hawthorne, realizes that the prophetess must be “lofty, pure, and beautiful,” not “stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow” (227-228). Hawthorne puts Hester in her place and she finally accepts. Thus, the dialectical tension between her metaphorical place and her physical place is alleviated.
Discipline and Subversion?
In conclusion, a couple of assumptions are worth identifying and summarizing. First, we can assume that subjectivity always depends upon place. We hear this in the general expression of “feeling out of place,” the sexist expression that “a woman’s place is in the home,” and the racist expression of “separate but equal” to support segregation. In all of these moments, place, as both a social, metaphorical position and a physical, literal location, becomes a primary agent in subject-formation. According to Mary Pat Brady, the social production of space effects “the choices people can make and how they conceptualize themselves, each other, and the world” (8). Furthermore, space is thoroughly and inevitably tied to other social constructs, such as the discourses of sin and sexuality. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes that Hester and her daughter, Pearl, “stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society” (85). Provoked by their understandings of sin and sexuality and their desire to control their citizens in these terms, the Puritans place the sinner (Hester) and the product of sin (Pearl) in a physical/metaphorical circle of seclusion/ exclusion. This placement, of course, has profound effects on their understanding not only of their relation to the community, but also of themselves as individuals.
Second, we can assume that place is a site through which subjects exercise power and through which power is exercised on them. Whether Hawthorne’s Puritans force Hester to stand on the scaffold within the public gaze or to occupy her cabin on the margins of town, they use space as a means by which to exercise their power. But, and this is crucial, they are not immune from having power exercised on them. Simply because they are participants in social relations, they too are susceptible to the effects or consequences of power. Michel Foucault theorizes that power relations are everywhere: whenever two or more people are involved, a power relation exists. In “The Subject and Power,” he characterizes this relation as “a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face to face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation” (222). Following Foucault, we can say that Hester remains in a “permanent provocation” with her totalitarian government. She is “put in place,” but she also subverts or challenges the authority of this place by asserting her “A” in “non-A” space and, therefore, exercises a kind of power over her oppressors.
Although in the end, Hawthorne forecloses any possibility for Hester to overcome her totalitarian society and thus eliminating her power, we don’t have to. We can and should examine the ways in which any kind of discipline opens up the possibility to resist that discipline. Or, in the language of Thomas L. Dumm, we can and should examine the ways in which “the birth of the prison is also the birth of the means through which it may be resisted” (117). Looking at discourse, discipline, and the function of space in The Scarlet Letter is important not only because it yields a more accurate understanding of the characters’ situations within the text, but also, and perhaps more importantly, of our own situation in the real world.
Works Cited
Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
Dumm, Thomas L. Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd ed. Eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Herbert, T. Walter. “Pornographic Manhood and The Scarlet Letter.” Studies in American Fiction 29.1 (2001): 113-120.