The Surveillance of Woman's Body in Hawthorne's Short Stories

Abstract

In many of his female-centered stories, Hawthorne shows the need to control woman’s sexuality or to insist upon her purity with a type of morality play whose sexual dynamics correspond to the theories of nineteenth-century sexuality that Foucault has set forth. As Foucault has shown in his History of Sexuality, it was not so much that sexuality was repressed in the nineteenth century, but rather that the bourgeois felt the need to control the sex (reproductive functions as well as family patterns) of the “lower” classes. Thus, there was a strange obsession and manifestation with sexuality, which was expressed in the many advice books and control mechanisms, but which ultimately had an outlet in the many varied forms of the discourse of sexuality, of which woman was often the central protagonist. Indeed, woman’s body becomes the site upon which the battle of the classes was fought. Hawthorne’s stories serve as vignettes exemplifying the compulsion to control woman’s body—as the narrators and male protagonists take on a Foucauldian surveillance. The scenarios vary but point to the same conclusion: unrestrained female sexuality (or unrestrained in the eyes of men)