15
Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History
In the simple distinction between our own and past societies we avoid calling into question our own position, the place from which we ourselves speak. (Žižek, 102)
In literary criticism and scholarship, it is always a tricky enterprise to use the standards and dilemmas of the present as a lens for viewing and interpreting the past. One is afraid of being too presentist, of creating counterfactuals that go against the effort to ground literary texts and authors in their historical specificity. One expects such a criticism, for example, in relation to American authors of historical novels writing before the 1950s, criticized for their inability to place their characters in multicultural or culturally diverse settings. It also arises as a response to feminist critiques of American authors who cannot attribute to their female protagonists the same degree of presence, agency, subjectivity, and freedom as their male counterparts.
Our lens in the early twenty-first century is supposed to have broadened to include a notion of American literature as a more gender-diverse and racially capacious space. To the degree that racial segregation and female marginalization were aspects of earlier moments in American society and culture, it is to be expected that those norms would shape the previous literary worlds and consciousnesses of American authors. However, what if we took the very terms by which previous authors saw their world, their America, not as some kind of natural social or historical fact, but rather as they themselves defined it by a set of occlusions and repressions? These occlusions have to do not only with the exclusion of the actual or historical conditions of women and people of color in previous eras of American history. They also exclude the very instabilities produced within the American subject when the narrative frames of nationality, masculinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and Christianity cannot fully contain the equally powerful fantasies of the self and the Other that made up the space of intercultural interaction in the early American colonies.
Another real loss, then, in the exclusion or marginalization of people of color and women in American narratives is the veiling of the problems those Other subjects represented for the white, male, Anglo-American traditionally conceived as the template for the American self. Yet I would argue that this is one of the more fruitful entryways for pursuing the question of Otherness and Others in early American texts. Even in the canonical work of a traditional male author, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), one can read, in those moments when the worlds of men, women, and people of color brush up against each other, a more complex and messy narrative of the prohibitions that were necessary in order to occlude and contain the intercultural relations that shaped both racial norms and sexual mores in the early colonies.
As much as distinct, official, community identities and nationalities were created from the economically intertwined, interimperial history of the New World, so too were the very subjects created by those histories also experiencing a variety of destabilizations and anxieties produced by the colonial encounter. These psychic splits and fissures problematized the very question of who or what constituted a standard American from within, producing “forms of suppression and disavowal” precisely in order to contain such identity rifts (Fischer 20). Not surprisingly, sexuality or sexual relations, or, even more specifically, intimacy – the intimacy of proximal relations – is an arena that has much to tell us about this secret dimension of American literature and history, the worlds of gender, color, and labor that the Anglo-American male subject inhabited and was shaped by in both conscious and unconscious ways.
The Scarlet Letter is, of course, one of the paradigmatic tales of sexual mores and behaviors set during the era of American Puritanism. And it is toward the end of that very novel that the author uses a word that first struck this reader as oddly anachronistic in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, when the novel was written – the word is “diversity.” As Hawthorne describes a scene in the town of Salem’s marketplace on the occasion of a public holiday in the mid-1600s, he states, “The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue” (148).
By retracing the paths this term takes in the text, acknowledging its origin in present connotations and concerns but moving backward to the arena of meaning laid out by Hawthorne’s use of the term, I argue here that the diversity of the American past is revealed in the novel’s veiled references to the more polyglot and polyamorous worlds of gender, color, labor, and sexuality that underlie the narrative’s primary plot.
We read the political unconscious of American fictions for the ways the classed, racial, gendered, sexual tensions of the text attempt to resolve contradictions internal to the societies from which they are created. Here I am arguing that “reading for diversity” in the context of early American texts means reading for the intercultural unconscious of such works, that is, reading for the ways the classed, racial, gendered, sexual tensions of the imagined American society emerge in the face of difference from without. As such, this reading mimics that of the nineteenth-century critic Jane Swisshelm, who reviewed Hawthorne’s novel when it was first published. As Robert Levine describes, in her clever and ironic “misreading” of Hawthorne’s intentions, her “own uncertainty about Hawthorne’s didactic aims [is] suggested by her repeated use of ‘if’” when considering “Hawthorne’s conflict between his attraction to the subversive Hester and his desire to contain her” (Levine 278–9). She anticipates the type of “aversive reading” Sacvan Bercovitch calls for that emphasizes “dissent over containment” (Levine 290). I argue strenuously here that The Scarlet Letter is fully amenable to just such a reading, but not for reasons shaped solely by feminist concerns. In addition, a potentially counterfactual reading that begins from the traces of the diversity of the present immanent in the text can also rebuild the very worlds of color, labor, gender, and sexuality in early American history whose tensions and rough edges are simultaneously inscribed on and disavowed in Hawthorne’s imaginary construction of America (Fischer). These tensions reveal the instabilities produced in the early American colonies and later republics by the global market economies and hemispheric historical conditions within which they were situated. As such, the close reading I offer here, of a seemingly innocuous feature of the marketplace that serves as the setting for Hester Prynne’s public exposure and shaming, is intended also as a harbinger for what more aversive, counterfactual approaches in American literary studies can reveal in traditional texts – not so much their subversive or dissenting features as the ways they bear witness to their own inability to contain the diverse elements and forces constituting American social and cultural orders across times and regions.
The Picture of Human Life in The Scarlet Letter
In his one-sentence description of the “diversity of hue” present in Salem’s marketplace, Hawthorne encapsulates two of the key features of the diversity of this mid-seventeenth-century world that is the setting of his story (148). The first is the market-based context within which “cultural diversity” first emerges. The second is the intersubjective nature of a Puritan identity colored by the settlers’ awareness of the differences surrounding them in the other inhabitants of the New World.
The marketplace that serves as the backdrop for this colorful scene is suggestive of the public sphere of economic activity and transatlantic trade that is also the determinative force shaping the scene’s motley features. In their account of the early days of the “revolutionary Atlantic,” Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker use the term “motley” to describe the heterogeneous populations involved in and interacting together as part of the seventeenth-century trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Derived from a garment used in Renaissance England, a motley was “a multicolored garment, often a cap, worn by a jester who was permitted by the king to make jokes, even to tell the truth. … [T]he motley brought carnivalesque expectations of disorder and subversion, a little letting-off of steam” (Linebaugh and Rediker 28). As they continue to describe, “motley could also refer to a colorful assemblage,” not unlike the crowd Hawthorne is attempting to describe in the Salem marketplace – or a “ ‘lumpen’-proletariat,” not unlike the motley crews of the various trading ships crossing the Atlantic in the early days of New World discovery and trade. These ships were populated by a diverse group of laborers, both men and women who “worked as skilled navigators and sailors on early transatlantic ships, as slaves on American plantations, and as entertainers, sex workers, and servants in London” (28).
We can follow the routes of Linebaugh’s and Rediker’s Atlantic ships of the revolutionary seventeenth century forward to the world of modern capitalism. At the start of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase “worlds of color” to describe precisely the convergence of “modern imperialism and modern industrialism” as “one and the same system; root and branch of the same tree” (386). Laura Doyle turns our attention to the place of Anglo-American literary history within an “Atlantic modernity reaching from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century” (304). This trajectory also extended into the twentieth century for Du Bois. The word “color” in his famous trope of the twentieth-century color line referred not just to the problem of race as racism but also to the problem of race as precisely the interdependency of national labor relations and global market concerns: “the race problem is the other side of the labor problem [and] empire is the heavy hand of capital abroad” (386). In addition, Du Bois used the phrase “worlds of color” to capture the relations of mutual dependency between empires and colonies. His trope of Europe as part of a network of “worlds of color” is not unlike Sean Goudie’s imagining of the early United States as a “creole” republic where the founding fathers, as invested as they were in political independence, found themselves still as dependent on colonial markets and economic relations as the rest of the colonies of the Americas.
So, in the economic trajectory traced by Linebaugh and Rediker and by Du Bois, the diversity of seventeenth-century America reflects a world of commerce and labor that is racialized in ways that continue to shape the relations of dependency between empires and colonies at the start of the twentieth century. In this sense, “diversity” is not anachronistic in Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century world as much as it references the forces that set that very world described in motion – a broader, global, economic context that interpellates multiple subjects in different locations and creates a logic still operative for Du Bois in the industrial world of the early twentieth century.
What is different from the twentieth century in Hawthorne’s account, however, is that, to the degree that we associate diversity with the cultures of peoples of color, the second aspect of the “diversity of hue” in his Salem marketplace includes the Puritans dressed in their “sad gray, brown, or black” apparel. Focusing on their clothing, Hawthorne points subtly to their own self-construction not merely for religious purposes, but in addition as a response characteristic of Europeans more broadly when faced with the worlds of difference and color they were newly encountering in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The choice against color that seems so characteristic of the Puritans is as much a racial as a religious choice – a choice shaped by encounters between racially diverse populations. By the nineteenth century, this choice had taken on such ideological rigidity that color itself signified as the very essence of the difference between the European settlers and the American populations surrounding them. As the anthropologist Michael Taussig describes,
“Men in a state of nature,” wrote Goethe in his book on color, “uncivilized nations and children, have a great fondness for colours in their utmost brightness.” … He recalled a German mercenary returned from America who had painted his face with vivid colors in the manner of the Indians, the effect of which “was not disagreeable.” On the other hand, in northern Europe at the time in which he wrote in the early nineteenth century, people of refinement had a disinclination to colors, women wearing white, the men, black. (3)
In What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig pursues this history of color further, offering an archaeology of how we have come to think about color by demonstrating its links to colonialism. Unraveled, color signifies as nothing less than “the making of culture from the human body,” in other words, the implication of the human body and the sensuous realm it inhabits in the manufacture of cultural regulations, prescriptions, attributes, and norms (Taussig 8). Taussig argues further,
Even in the West color is a whole lot more than hue. … [I]t is the combustible mix of attraction and repulsion towards color that … as Goethe’s face-painted mercenary suggests, owe more than a little to the Western experience of colonization as colored Otherness. (9)
If we follow Taussig’s narrative to its logical conclusions, when we state our postmodern truism that race is a social construction, we are also saying that the color of human skin has been embedded with a set of social meanings already attached to the idea of color itself as a racialized construct, a mark of difference; the chicken and the egg, the organic and the cultural, the body and its apparel, become indistinguishable.
Lest we think Hawthorne’s notion of diversity differs greatly from most twenty-first-century Americans’ notions of racial diversity, beyond the first two features of seventeenth-century diversity we noted – the marketplace and the Puritans’ self-fashioning of their own sense of difference – the racialization of color, fabric, and the body’s apparel are integral to his continuing description of the diversity of figures in the marketplace. As he remarks,
A party of Indians – in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear – stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond even what the Puritan aspect could attain. (Hawthorne 148)
It is the curious place of the Native American in Hawthorne’s text that is my point of focus, however, for explicating the subtlety with which Hawthorne, consciously or not, locates the diversity of an early America. We find this diversity in the novel in the traces of worlds of color, gender, labor, and sexuality that Anglo-American male subjects brush up against in their interactions in the New World.
In her own situating of The Scarlet Letter within an Atlantic context, Laura Doyle argues convincingly that the “Indian-associated imagery” of the novel represents fantasies in which Hawthorne “himself becomes the ‘removed’ victim … identifying with the removed outsider, taking up the very weapons of that wronged figure, but then usurping the place of that figure” in a way that ultimately shores up his Anglo-American male self (311). For Doyle, while the “story takes place in a colony flanked on one side by the peopled and troubled nation of England and on the other side by the peopled and troubled nations of Indian America. … [Hawthorne] largely de-peoples these adjacent, interlocked communities,” thus burying the “foundational violence” of the colonial encounter (307). Her interest is in the ways Hawthorne both merges and suppresses “the threat of women and the threat of Indians,” precisely because both could potentially “expel Anglo-American men from their dominance in ‘the field’ ” (314).
We can build on her analysis of the convergence between the Indian and Hester Prynne’s “fallen” sexuality if we see this linking not only as a metaphor or instance of deviant colonial relations to be suppressed, but also as the very condition of coloniality itself, a naturalized as opposed to marginal component of early coloniality. The ever present possibility and proximity of miscegenated relations were New World realities that were constantly repressed and disavowed, precisely due to their ability to reveal the instability of racialized and gendered norms in a world of commercial exchanges and cross-cultural interactions. As Lisa Lowe confirms, historically the colony was the space where the lines between the worlds of gender, color, sexuality, and labor blurred:
Conjugal and familial relations in the bourgeois home [were often] distinguished from the public realm of work, society, and politics. … In the colonial context sexual relations were not limited to a “private” sphere but included practices that disrespected such separations, ranging from rape, assault, domestic servitude, or concubinage to “consensual relations” between colonizers and colonized. (Lowe 195)
Regulatory fantasies of the Other and prescriptive fictions of the Self emerge in the face of the de facto legitimacy of inevitable, inescapable, informal, and unorthodox intimate relations. These sexual relations simultaneously supported norms of patriarchy and heterosexuality whilst undermining them from within.
What Hawthorne symbolically prefigures in his positioning of the figure of the Native American in the novel as within the community of the public sphere, rather than without, is the way sexual transgressions reflect the broader instability of the rules governing the European settler community’s sexual boundaries and behaviors in the New World. In other words, colonization and coloniality are revealed in The Scarlet Letter in the moral instability of bourgeois, European heterosexuality itself, given the informal legitimacy of illegitimate intimate relations within the space of the colony. As Doyle also reminds us, Governor Richard Bellingham, the historical figure whom Hawthorne places on the scaffolding above Hester Prynne in her moment of public shaming and judgment, in actuality had been “voted out of office, in May 1642, for conduct not so different from Hester’s” (304). His was only one of a “series of sexual transgressions with which the colony elders were grappling in the early 1640s,” scandals involving the colony’s founding fathers themselves. While for many this leads to the criticism that Hawthorne, in not revealing this much messier sexual history of the founding fathers, simultaneously avoids the violent relations between Puritans and Indians by turning our gaze “strictly to intra-community Puritan violence,” it is also true that, without the ominous presence of the Native American as one marker for “wildness” in the text, even the revelation of Bellingham’s and others’ indiscretions could have been read simply as exceptional instances of violation internal to this specific Puritan community (309).
In contrast, in the colonial space of polycultural interactions, various relations of proximity and intimacy, power and labor, were the norm, and intimacies developed from the meeting of the peoples of four continents in the New World that are absent from the official colonial archive. As Lowe also describes,
The racial classifications in the archive arose, thus, in this context of the colonial need to prevent those unspoken intimacies among the colonized. This other valence of intimacies, then, can be said to be the obverse of the intimacy of bourgeois domesticity. These intimacies are the range of laboring contacts that are necessary for the production of bourgeois domesticity; they are also the intimacies of captured workers existing together, the proximity and affinity that gave rise to political, sexual, intellectual connections. (203)
If we place the figures of Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, and the unnamed Native American within this intimate, laboring world of color, triangulating the relations between colonizer and colonized, we find that the world of color is constituted precisely by those interactions missing from the colonial record but haunting the sexual interstices and moral outskirts of the founding fathers’ domestic narratives.
What this reading of Hawthorne’s narrative aims to demonstrate is that what may be missing from the colonial archive can also be present, as a trace, in the most traditional or canonical of American literary texts. This is especially true when these texts, and the sexual relations they reference, are set against the backdrop of an Atlantic economy. While this is not Hawthorne’s primary setting, the Atlantic context is still very much present in the ironic registers of The Scarlet Letter. The trope of the colorful Native American Taussig finds so problematic in European colonial discourse actually functions in a much more layered way in Hawthorne’s novel. The reference to the Native American standing amidst the marketplace crowd actually refers back to an earlier scene in the novel when Hester Prynne appears in the same marketplace for her first public shaming before her fellow townspeople, with the scarlet letter A embroidered on her chest. Hawthorne describes this early scene from Hester’s point of view:
From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native garb was standing there. (44)
The Native American, we are first led to believe, is so irresistibly compelling as to distract Hester Prynne from her own unique predicament as a white female being cast out by her Puritan community for adultery. As Hester’s own objectification becomes less fascinating to her, the reader also turns away from the scene of her humiliation to follow her gaze at the exotic American Other – the Native American as the vision of the “colored Otherness” Taussig describes.
As it turns out, however, the focus of Hester Prynne’s attention is not the Native American at all. The more subtle dimensions of Hawthorne’s portrayal of this seventeenth-century American world lie in this very simple observation. For Hawthorne actually pushes the Native American to the background as merely another prosaic feature of the landscape Hester is looking out onto, the world of the marketplace that extends well beyond the confines of her own moral and gendered dilemma. The relegation of the Native American to the background is rhetorically underscored by Hawthorne’s use of a colon, which he then follows with the following statement:
but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements, that one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume. (44)
Both Hester’s shaming, then, and the Native American’s exotic presence, two somewhat unorthodox features in this Puritan landscape, are nevertheless represented as two of the more mundane aspects of the everyday relations of community and proximity shared by English settlers, shamed women, and Native Americans alike. By mentioning the Native American and then discounting him, Hawthorne does a double action of both highlighting his presence and then de-exoticizing him as the figure one might presume to be the deviant Other in this setting. The Native American functions instead as a natural part of this scene, but not because he blends with nature. Rather, in the context of the marketplace, both the smaller public sphere of the colony and the larger, developing global economy it is a satellite of, interactions and transactions with Native Americans are familiar enough that they blend with the Puritan inhabitants of the colony themselves.
In the earlier scene in the novel, despite the distractions of the main action – Hester’s public shaming – it is neither the sexual deviance of the Puritan female subject nor the deviant cultural exoticism of the Native American New World subject that ultimately threatens the foundations of this Puritan community. Rather, the true object of attention in the scene is the possible sexual and cultural corruption of the European male subject, a Chillingworth dressed in his “strange disarray of civilized and savage costume.” He represents by extension the other upstanding men of Salem such as the Reverend Dimmesdale, who is the undisclosed father of Hester Prynne’s child. Like the painted German mercenary Taussig describes, it is the corruption of the white male subject and narrative by the different causal forces that shape interactions and actions in a world of color – forces of difference and desire – that is at the center of Hester’s attention and the focus of the reader’s gaze.
When Roger Chillingworth, the white man on the outskirts observing Hester’s humiliation, describes himself to a bystander as the recent captive of his Native American companion, he is told in response, “Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness … to find yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out … here in our godly New England” (Hawthorne 45). Of course, the irony of this comment is that, for all the boldness and exposure of Hester’s scarlet A, the one thing the patriarchal community elders have not gotten her to do is to reveal the identity of the man with whom she conceived her child. In refusing to name the father, Hester enacts her own refusal to engage the public ritual of shaming that the prescriptions governing Puritan heterosexuality require.
In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s punishment is crucial then not only as a measure for policing female sexuality, but also as a measure for securing the sexual boundaries and kinship laws necessary if this liminal Puritan community, settled in the borderland between the “wilderness” of the Native Americans and the distant European homeland, is to maintain and preserve in the New World the stabilizing, patriarchal features of the Old World past. It is the very policing of sexuality itself that enables the construction of community boundaries in a world in which those very boundaries are not at all givens, and that once established are constantly in threat of erosion by the very reality of cross-cultural intimacies and proximities in the early colonial world. Hawthorne’s Puritan community remains successfully isolated in a de-peopled landscape only when we read Hester’s dilemma as the exception to community norms, the narrative provided on the surface of the text. However, reading the narrative more aversively, for the traces it contains but cannot contain, the sexual dilemma at the heart of the novel is not the exception but the very norm signaled by the shadowy figures of deviant others and wild landscapes that migrate from the margins to occupy the same central space – of the colony, of the market – as the founding elders themselves.
The family arrangements and gendered relations that lay at the core of bourgeois domesticity were some of the most important markers of European civilization preserved by the American colonists. Idealized European family arrangements were often used to define the very meaning of family and kinship for other communities in the colonies:
bourgeois intimacy was precisely a biopolitics through which the colonial powers administered the enslaved and colonized and sought to indoctrinate the newly freed into forms of Christian marriage and family. The colonial management of sexuality, affect, marriage and family among the colonized formed a central part of the microphysics of colonial rule. (Lowe 193)
Against this backdrop, what we can also read for in early American narratives is the instability of the European family in the face of mobility, miscegenation, and difference. Doyle argues rightly that the scene of Hester’s undoing occurs before the novel even begins, in “the transatlantic migration of Hester alone [to the Americas]. It is this fact that determines Hester’s ‘fall’ ” (301; emphasis in original). We can extend this observation to say that the narrative of that undoing is still unfolding in the New World, as all social and sexual norms are in danger of being undone by colonial life. Using irony and foreshadowing to great psychological effect, what Hawthorne actually establishes in his use of the Native American both in the novel’s opening scene and throughout is his status as a trope or marker for an alternate sexual and intercultural reality that parallels the conventional colonial setting of America’s Puritan origins.
The reality that the waves of the transatlantic economy could also shape and reshape white European females’ desires is captured in Hester’s impassioned cry to the father of her child, the Reverend Dimmesdale, that they escape the reprobation of the Puritan community by setting out once again into the wild, marine world of the Atlantic:
“Is the world, then, so narrow?” exclaimed Hester Prynne. … “Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder forest track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness … until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man’s tread.” (127)
Often in American literature, it is women of a “diversity of hues” who find themselves standing at the crossroads between the world of their culture, and a world of color in which interactions with Others are the everyday norm rather than the exotic exception. This world of color lies at the borderland, at the frontiers, at the margins, of hegemonic national narratives. It is the world of the wilderness from which the Native American figure in Hawthorne’s Salem comes, and also a world that Chillingworth, the white man, inhabits because it is the conceptual space where a historical narrative of the material relations between Puritans and Natives – relations of war, commerce, sex, cultural exchange, miscegenation, and kinship – supercedes the more bounded narratives of each as distinct imagined communities. And to the degree that gender and sexuality provide crucial axes along which stable national identities are both defined and simultaneously undermined, women are less the symbols of Puritan corruption, as in the more straightforward reading of Hester Prynne’s dilemma, than the bulwark against a deeper fear of the corruption of the European male subject by his own miscegenated desires.
To the degree that the interaction with difference in the New World threatened the stability of prior domestic arrangements central to European conceptions of civilization, Hester’s sin is not just a violation of the terms of the Puritan society being established in Salem. It also reflects women’s complex place within the creolizing realities of communal relations forged in an emerging transatlantic economy. Hawthorne, by telling the story of Hester Prynne, tells us about not just a Puritan world but also the economic, sexual, social, and cultural relations within which that world was inscribed. Rather than Hester’s womanhood being merely the symbol of the corruption of a Puritan world, Hester is also the vehicle by which the instability of Puritan society and masculinity, in the face of and surrounded by a world of color, is revealed. As Sean Goudie also describes in Creole America, it was precisely these proximate relations, these near brushes up against difference, which complicated the white male settlers’ efforts to define a New World form of Creole nationality that could be politically independent from European governance whilst remaining dependent on Europe’s cultural identity and the economic influence of the transatlantic market.
As much as The Scarlet Letter stands as one of the classics in a national, American, literary tradition, such a text is also to be situated in its hemispheric context since it is very much within this economic and historical Atlantic context – on the ocean – that the alternative landscape of an early American world of color – on land – can also emerge. The history the novel evokes, of adultery and patriarchy within a Puritan community surrounded by the Otherness and difference of early American communities, shapes a circum-Atlantic landscape in which processes of sexual and gender formation in the Americas writ large are shaped by the multiple worlds of color created by labor and transatlantic trade. The moment Hawthorne chooses to return to is, of course, highly symbolic; The Scarlet Letter is set roughly between 1642 and 1649, a mere “fifteen or twenty years after the settlement” of this town of Salem by men who will become in New World history “the founders of a new colony” (36). These men aspired to create a late seventeenth-century “Utopia of human virtue and happiness,” and they will literally become the authors of the myths that will found a new republic (36). The Scarlet Letter’s opening scene is set within the frame of this hegemonic national narrative of white, Anglo-Saxon origin, with an accompanying focus on the patriarchal, religious mission that defined the Puritan settlement project. Hawthorne intentionally evokes this history when he locates Governor John Winthrop, the famous author of the Puritan ideal of creating in the Americas a “city upon a hill,” as an actual historical character whose death is referenced in the text.
However, intentionally or not Hawthorne also captures other equally typical, even if less legitimate or hegemonic, aspects of this early founding scene. Both Hester’s adultery and the heathen world of the Native American in the wilderness are the proximate, mundane realities of the surrounding New World that both the public act of shaming and the Puritan text must work to locate at the margins. This is in order to protect and preserve at the center an ideal vision of the colony as a “Utopia of human virtue and happiness,” that is, as a site of idealized, Anglo-American sexual and gendered relations. By the later scene in the marketplace, Hawthorne develops much more fully the relations between the Puritans’ will to preserve the integrity of their social and religious community, the multicultural world he rebuilds around them in Salem, and the transatlantic foundations of this world of diverse hue represented in this Puritan marketplace on the occasion of the “election day” holiday.
Once again, in the later scene the Native Americans constitute only one aspect of the colorful marketplace. “Wild as were these painted barbarians,” they are relegated to the ordinary when compared with the even more disruptive group whom Hawthorne describes as “the wildest feature of the scene” (148). Unlike the exotic Native American Other, these men hail from Europe’s shores: “some mariners – a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main, – who had come ashore to see the humors of Election day.” Elaborating further on these “rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces,” Hawthorne uses garb and clothing once again to reveal the markers of the mariners’ alternate notion of community, distinct from Puritan social and religious norms. And yet, the narrator complains further, given that these men “transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were binding on all others,” their benevolent treatment by the Puritans was a sign of the “incomplete morality of the age.” “Rigid as we call it,” the age of the Puritans, the Puritan leaders yet allowed a certain “license” to “the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element,” the sea, where they engaged in acts and behaviors closer to those of the pirates (148).
As his description continues, Hawthorne does away with even the dichotomy that Linebaugh and Rediker describe in their conception of a revolutionary Atlantic, where pirates and mariners created an alternative network of sea-based states, “hydrarchies,” which operated by their own rules and undermined the powers of the imperial units governing the triangular trade. Instead, in The Scarlet Letter the worlds of hydrarchy and of Puritan social and religious convention became mutually dependent on and interactive with each other. As Hawthorne recounts in a lengthy and dramatic description,
But the sea, in those old times, 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. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land. … Thus, the Puritan elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men. (148)
With this elaboration on the place of the mariner in relationship to the world of the male Puritan elders, now the “old times” of the founding of the Salem colony reflect the transatlantic rather than the Puritan origins of an American world. Thus, in a final twist Hawthorne reminds us that the issue at stake in the novel is not the comparative cultural differences between different communities, Indians and Puritans, preachers and mariners, but rather the manner in which economic forces are actually working to undermine those very differences, to make them signify less meaningfully in the face of other imperatives and priorities.
Revisiting the World of The Scarlet Letter Today
Because of the work of scholars such as Laura Doyle and Sean Goudie, a strand of American literary scholarship is already engaged in resituating the nation and American literary histories in the creolized space of the transatlantic. However, just as the word “creole” itself derives from questions of mixture and sexual hybridization, a question we can now ask more fully of American literary history is, “Precisely what were the new worlds of sex and gender created by and formed in the crucible of New World discovery?” Can we identify as a strand of the American literary tradition narratives that, in describing the boundaries of defined New World communities such as the Puritans’, have also left clues of the adjacent and equally defining communities within which those Puritan settlements were situated and with whom they interacted? American communities were as much about imagining communal identities as about regulating imaginary and symbolic relations – that is, the more unconscious intercultural relations of desire that occurred side by side with more conscious forms of cultural interaction. It is these circum-Atlantic historical relations, labeled under the stigma and the category of miscegenation, that Joseph Roach reminds us are at the heart of a constitutive amnesia in telling the story of New World formations.
In thinking about the place of women in the worlds of color, gender, and labor that characterize New World and American cultural and literary histories, one can read intimacy itself as a globalized relation, with the sexual and gendered identities of both colonizer and colonized read together as mutually constituted by the laboring, multicultural formation of the New World. Hawthorne describes the change in Hester’s development and disposition once thrust outside the boundaries of a regulated, prescribed femininity. She wanders instead, “without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness … where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods” (128). What puts Hester in this place without the rule of law is precisely her alienation from the bourgeois conventions that determine the difference between public and private life and a woman’s place in both:
For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. … The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. (Hawthorne 128)
Hester has not only become a foreigner in her own country with a license to travel in another, the world she looked out on when first spotting Chillingworth and the Native American standing on the outskirts of the marketplace. In addition, her exiled condition is shaped specifically by the disruption of the codes and conventions governing sexual and gendered relations in her “country” of origin, the colony. As such, Hester’s individual condition of exile could be said to characterize the parameters of the sexual formations created in the New World as a whole. To some degree, the potential for sexual transgressions of all kinds was the reality shaping the colonies as a world of color, and the very condition of possibility shaping Hawthorne’s text. In the colony, “exile” from gendered conventions and institutions was itself the norm shaping the defining of American gendered and sexual identities, even when such definitions relied on the forceful imposition of gender or intimacy prescriptions left behind in the Old World.
The project of an Americanist literary scholarship that takes the Americas as a whole as its geohistorical landscape should be not to discover simply “who got left out” of Anglo-American narrative histories. Rather, we also need to explore the forces threatening early Anglo-American societies and colonies that then created the terms of exclusion that shaped these early literary texts. In other words, if we begin from the presumption that is evident throughout Atlantic history that the Atlantic world was a polycultural world, with various forms of official and unofficial community and individual interactions between peoples of many races, then the question becomes not just who was left out but also who had to be created in order for those other worlds to be occluded and obscured in the first place. The landscape of American history was obviously populated by women and people of color. In American literary history, however, very different models of the white, male, American self can also emerge when he is placed in less regulated and prescribed intersubjective interactions with those women and people of color surrounding him. As much as we find it appropriate to historicize seventeenth-century Puritan relations, or the politics of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century context, as appropriate historical determinants of his novel, so too must we include the sexual histories of New World relations as an equally valid historical backdrop for locating the worlds of color and diversity of hue in The Scarlet Letter.
Contemporary authors have created their own answers to these questions by retelling stories of colonization in which, simultaneously, certain notions of the central white male European subject are peripheralized (opening the space for new representations of white, Anglo-American masculinity) and certain unexpected relations between characters of different races emerge (complicating the imperatives of colonial conquest and the civilizing mission). In Toni Morrison’s 2009 novel A Mercy, and Bharati Mukherjee’s 1993 rewriting of Hawthorne’s classic, The Holder of the World, both authors open up the space of the Atlantic to describe worlds of color and labor that were created when the populations from four continents met.
In an almost direct confrontation with the nation’s Puritan narratives of origin, Morrison shifts her readers’ attention southward to that other founding American colony in Virginia, and to an interval in the American past just before racial categories solidified. On a small farm, the Vaark estate, four women – a European, a Native American, a woman of both black and white parentage, and an African-descended slave – work together to carve out an existence after the death of the main male figure in the narrative, the farmer, slave owner, and husband, James Vaark. What brings them together is their mutual labor. Not only are they forced to work side by side in learning how to make the Vaark farm productive. In addition, females in general function, regardless of hue, as labor – whether as mail-order brides, indentured servants, rescued orphans, conquered natives, bought slaves, or laboring subjects on the farm, as field workers, sex workers, or domestic workers.
Similarly, when Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian American woman writer in the late twentieth century, travels back to the same world Nathaniel Hawthorne is visiting when he writes of Salem from the perspective of the nineteenth century, she elaborates on the complex sexual relations of the world that Mary Rowlandson and Hester Prynne inhabit on the outskirts of the Puritan colony and beyond. In Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, too much time in the wilderness not only threatens a European woman’s Puritan faith, but also opens her up to recognizing in an almost anthropological sense that the “savages” possess a coherent culture and worldview of their own. In Mukherjee’s reimagining of such a world, English women who wear the scarlet letter have engaged specifically in the sin of miscegenation with Native Americans, English colonizers negotiate exile by adopting Native American names for their towns, and Christian Indians live with conquest as they return straying English children back to their family homesteads safely. For Mukherjee, the world of the past to be rebuilt is one in which English settlers identify with native Americans not just to appropriate their cultural identities. Together they imaginatively inhabit, if only for a brief interval in time, a shared American community of hardships, expropriations, and deprivations as well as collaborations, negotiations, and cooperation.
In both of these instances, authors who share a contemporary vision of a diverse America return to the seventeenth century precisely in order to create a usable, American, multicultural past. What I find more useful about their novels, however, is their grounding of the diversity of that past in the confused sexual politics, mores, and behaviors of early American subjects. I believe a place lies therein for thinking about references to the proximate intimacies of a world of color as the formal place in the early American literary text where previous authors, in reconstructing the nation’s past, could not completely avoid rendering traces of the polyamorous and polyglot new world within which the history of the nation is embedded. Slavoj Žižek’s response to the critique of presentism is relevant here, for as he observes, “Much more subversive than ‘entering the spirit of the past’ is thus in contrast the procedure by which we consciously treat it ‘anti-historically’, ‘reduce the past to the present’” (102–3). Literary scholars are much too historical to take Žižek’s recommendation completely at face value (in the way that authors of fiction such as Morrison and Mukherjee can, for example, imagine and create counterfactual worlds). However, his words should inspire in us the idea that if one looks conscientiously for the seeds of the present in early American narratives, one could find a past that does, in a sense, originate from contemporary concerns. After all, we still live in the aftermath of that polyglot, New World modernity that American narratives, whether The Scarlet Letter, A Mercy, or The Holder of the World, all struggle to make sense of, in the context of the worlds of color pressing in on the imaginations of their authors from their own place and time.
References and Further Reading
Anderson, Benedict. “Exodus.” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 314–27.
Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity. 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Du Bois, W.E.B. “Worlds of Color.” In W.E.B. Du Bois, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (pp. 383–414). New York: Atheneum, 1992.
Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Goudie, Sean X. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005.
Levine, Robert S. “Antebellum Feminists on Hawthorne: Reconsidering the Reception of The Scarlet Letter.” In The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings (pp. 274–90). Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005.
Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
Lowe, Lisa. “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” In Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (pp. 191–212). Ed. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York: Random House, 2008.
Mukherjee, Bharati. The Holder of the World. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Rowlandson, Mary. “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God.” In The Bedford Anthology of American Literature (pp. 192–228). Vol. 1. Ed. Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2008.
Swisshelm, Jane. “From the Saturday Visiter.” In The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings (pp. 271–4). Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005.
Taussig, Michael. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso, 1991.