“The Puritans of Today”: The Anti-Whig Argument of The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores the polemical context in which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. It pays particular attention to the Whig movement for moral reform in antebellum America, which sought to merge church and state. Democrats like Hawthorne took exception to this attempt to establish “moral government” in America. His novel argues for an ideal of personal freedom in moral matters and criticizes the Whig attempt to impose restrictive moral norms on human, especially sexual, proclivities that Democrats such as Hawthorne felt were embodiments of spirituality in nature. The novel refers obliquely to contemporary religious debates that have been ignored by scholars, such as that concerning Horace Bushnell's God in Christ, a book whose presence in Hawthorne's novel is palpable. Bushnell was put on trial for heresy in 1849, as Hawthorne was composing his novel. In the novel, Hawthorne enters those debates and takes the side of natural religion against the Whig ideal of moral government.