This Rag of Scarlet Cloth: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Abortion

Abstract

Pregnancy may be CONCEALED by an unmarried woman, and even by married ones under certain circumstances, to avoid disgrace and enable them to destroy their offspring in its mature or immature state. --Physician Theodric Beck, in his Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, 1825 What has society to do with this matter of one who was never born? --Abortionist Madame Restell, to her anonymous biographer in 1847 In his 1851 review of Scarlet Letter, Arthur Cleveland Coxe famously contends that Hawthorne's novel is at once beautiful and ambitious but that an under-tide of filth flows beneath surface of its artistry (259). Unsettled by what he sees as baffling incongruity between Hawthorne's choice of setting in the cradle of our country and topic of adultery, he asserts that Scarlet Letter encourages depravity under cover of respectability (256). Why has our author selected such a theme? Coxe asks (258); why take such a misstep (262) in representation of country? corrupting force of novel cannot be overstated, he claims, particularly because it encourages a different mode of life for women, one bound up with recent assertions of their rights at late Convention of females at Boston (262). As he builds his case against novel--its refusal to honor Puritan progenitors and its potential to lead astray daughters of America--Coxe at once incorporates genealogical terms of Anglo-American nationalism and reveals how insistently Scarlet Letter shatters them (259). Without quite being able to put his finger on it, he discerns novel as a threat to prevailing idealization of America as something born to and bequeathed by New England Puritans. Scarlet Letter indeed stages birth of nation in mother-forest on shores of Atlantic, imagining itself as new or and settlement so newly constructed, only to undermine that very idea or to name it as such: It was as if a new birth... had converted forest land, Hawthorne's narrator writes of Hester Prynne's world, calling attention to metaphor as an imposition of meaning and a falsehood (186, emphasis added). He also opens novel with reference to a portion of virgin soil where settlement's prison and its cemetery both stand, in a sly witticism that entwines womb of with its tombs (158). The spell survives, he explains in The Custom House of Salem's effect upon him, just as powerfully as if natal spell were an earthly paradise, and yet he contemplates it in very dark ways too, as a place of birth and burial where long-interred skeletons retain stain of blood on their bones (128, 126). He thus sets into motion American myth of origins--that projected [u]topia of human virtue and happiness (158)--only to cut it off. rich, longstanding literary association between textual and sexual reproduction allows him to imagine terms of a national epic, to reproduce lexicon of its idealism, and then terminate that conception's progression within his pages. With Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne hints at possibility that Anglo-America's birthright will find legitimacy under his authorship, but he engages instead in a form of abortion where no such patriotism takes hold. Hawthorne moves representation of a nation as born to or among a people into his tale about Pearl's birth, exploring what it means to see America in terms of biological gestation, as if gestation too is a form of destiny. He then runs this representation against his preference for scrapped sequences and broken chains, unpremeditated moments and latitude of speculation (204, 290). novel's main plotline itself, while luring his readers into expecting final reunion of Hester and Dimmesdale, is also severed. And it is Pearl who is asked to bear news: 'Thy mother is yonder woman with scarlet letter,' said seaman. …