SOURCE: Shulman, Robert. “The Artist in the Slammer: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Prison of Their Times.” Modern Language Studies 14, no. 1 (1984): 79-88.

[In the following essay, Shulman explores the theme of society as a prison in American literature, with special focus on the repression of creativity and artists. Shulman argues that authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe expressed in their writings a sense that even outside of a physical prison, the artist was confined by a particularly American drive toward conformity and sameness.]

Prisoners live in enclosed places. They want to get out but if they are in for a long time they work out ways of surviving. They also work out ways of defying the authorities and, if they cannot escape, they at least work out ways of communicating so as to escape detection. In these respects they share common ground with Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Each of these great mid-nineteenth-century American writers had special and also shared reasons for simultaneously communicating and concealing in the manner both of the symbolic artist and of the prisoner.

The symbolic mode, of course, was part of their artistic heritage. But a heritage is never simply passively absorbed. If it is to flourish it must satisfy the needs of a new generation. We must explain why Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe seized on the symbolic possibilities their culture made available to them. One explanation is that these writers were attracted to the possibilities of symbolism partly because of their experience as artists in a market society America each of them came to see as a prison. Because of the frequent conflict between their deepest insights and the demands of the marketplace, as an integral part of their careers as professional writers Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe were motivated to exploit the mode of symbolic indirection that was theirs for the taking. In their version of the style of the inmate, the techniques of symbolic indirection and symbolic intensification allowed them to communicate and conceal, to satisfy the demands of their vision and commitments and also to disguise them from unsympathetic readers. These techniques allowed Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe to defy their audience and at the same time attempt to succeed in the marketplace. In ways that differ for each of them, moreover, each of these authors came to experience his society not only as a positive resource for material and themes, of language and values, and not only as an antagonistic force hostile to their deepest needs as writers and therefore both stimulating them to express their own vision and making that enterprise difficult, but also more particularly they each came to experience America as a prison.

Melville's “Benito Cereno” is a preliminary example. Consider the dimension of “Benito Cereno” that is the symbolic allegory of a sensitive, Dimmesdale-like artist, Cereno, trying to communicate the truth of his situation to an audience, Delano. Delano is a close relative of those common-sense representatives of official society—Peter Hovenden in “The Artist of the Beautiful” or Baglioni in “Rappaccini's Daughter”—characters who repeatedly in Hawthorne's tragedies of the creator cause problems for his artist figures. The truth Cereno wants to convey through the indirect means forced on him by his situation is that he is a prisoner and that the surfaces of the ship are deadly and totally misleading. Delano, who is a prisoner without knowing it, is an insensitive and imperceptive audience, with nearly fatal results. For his part Cereno has been forced to do what inmates have always had to do: to find indirect ways of communicating in order to escape the detection of their keepers. Concentration camp inmates developed ways of conveying, and their friends on the outside of communicating, the truth about the camps. They did it through a code in obituary notices, an effective, macabre device all of our writers would have understood. Penitentiary inmates have their devices. As usual with Melville matters are complicated because Delano is in a sense one of the keepers and Babo is a rebellious slave and artist even more inventive than Cereno, so that even on this limited theme meanings proliferate in ways guaranteed to baffle and antagonize the Delano's of society.

Through both Cereno and Babo Melville transforms his own experience as a creator. It is instructive that based on his experience as a writer in America, Melville should parallel the experience of the inmate, imagine situations of confinement—the San Dominick, Bartleby's enclosed Wall Street office and prison—and develop the devices of symbolic indirection. The confined setting is explicitly that of the American author in the autobiographical Pierre's freezing, prison-like room where he writes his first book, after his introduction to the city in a surreal scene at a police station. Melville developed the techniques of the inmate in response to the conflicts between the demands of his vision and the demands of his public. In Moby-Dick he created an exuberant, expansive version of this style. After the brutally negative reception of Pierre, he went underground. The techniques of the inmate were not evident in his first novel, Typee, although it is the narrative of a prisoner's term and escape from a valley now seen as Paradise, now as Hell. In Chapter 17 of Typee the indictment of the new penitentiaries is not a casual digression but a reflection of a major concern with the prison-house of the modern market society in conflict with what turns out to be the threatening freedom and confinement of the traditional world.

Before his mature development as an artist, Melville was already compelled by the prisoner's situation. It posed for him the issues of dominance and rebellion, authority and freedom, issues he was to return to again and again in his career. In the course of his development Melville also found he needed to develop a style of symbolic indirection and symbolic intensification. As his vision darkened and deepened, as his concerns became more profound and far-ranging, Melville needed to satisfy the imperatives of his own outlook. In the marketplace where “dollars damn me,” however, readers demanded official optimism and were suspicious of metaphysical probing. Melville first experimented with a symbolic style in Mardi, avoided it in Redburn and White-Jacket, returned to it deeply in Moby-Dick, and after the reception of Pierre he worked hard on an inversion of the expansive style of Moby-Dick. He developed an inward-turning, symbolic technique that created surfaces that would satisfy his magazine audience and depths that a few might understand. Especially in his short fiction of the 1850's and The Confidence-Man he worked out the techniques of the inmate.

In Chapter 33 of The Confidence-Man Melville uses the figure of harlequin to express his commitment to this intense art of symbolic indirection. In opposition to the literal realism and conventional morality called for to achieve success in the marketplace, Melville affirms a stylized but unrestrained imaginative release, a symbolic acting out of the usually concealed realities of characters and situations. Melville's harlequin looks ahead to the suffering clowns of the twentieth-century artist. He also looks back to Poe's “Hop-Frog” (1849), one of the most disturbing enactments of the American artist's feelings of hatred against his imprisoned servitude to the public.

In this symbolic allegory Hop-Frog, jester to the King, is a captive entertainer at the court of a gross, imperceptive monarch. Hop-Frog's situation is similar to Babo's in “Benito Cereno.” Both are slaves, both feel abused and looked down on, both violently rebel, and both are inventive dramatists who stage performances that have terrifying consequences. It is sobering that Melville and Poe, both using the techniques of the inmate, should express such powerfully hostile feelings about the American artist and his public. Emerging from their experience as writers in America Melville and Poe focus on frustrated hatred, a sense of imprisonment, and a desire to murder and obliterate. Writing near the end of their careers as professional authors—and for Poe in the year of his death—in these stories Melville and Poe convey the intensity of their response to their situation as American authors.

In Hop-Frog's case, his initial powerless subservience to his public is combined with thwarted creative power, represented partly by his powerful teeth, arms, and chest above his crippled legs. To compound his sense of the artist's degradation and self-contempt, Poe presents Hop-Frog as a crippled dwarf. His employer constantly demands “invention,” “characters,” “something novel—out of the way.”¹ The story is dominated by the symbols of Hop-Frog's intense reaction against his caged imprisonment to this public and its demands. The image of the parrot's beak grating against its cage, the harsh noise dominating the entire chamber, is one major symbol of the hatred, frustration, and threatening, aggressive contempt the caged artist turns against himself and even more against those who have degraded him into a parrot, no nightingale or raven. The cruel noise dominates the final scene of awful revenge and turns out to be the grating of Hop-Frog's fang-like teeth.

“Inspired” by the wine he is forced to drink, Hop-Frog stages a play. It resembles the one whose violent first acts Babo directs and whose final scenes and scenario Babo conceives and also directs, down to the costumes, props, and casting of roles. In his version Hop-Frog tricks his employers and with their own consent tars and feathers King and court, chains them, and dresses them as apes. In thus reversing the conventional power relations, he makes a captive monkey of his public as he feels they have made a caged parrot of him. The artist who has turned his contempt against himself in the image of the crippled dwarf and unwilling today—hop, frog—at the end turns his hatred even more forcefully outward against the public he feels has maimed, abused, and imprisoned him. In another of Poe's Gothically darkened, prison-like chambers of the mind, Hop-Frog, “with the rapidity of thought” (p. 226), then illuminates the mind's destructive powers in his terrifying final action. His thwarted creative energies now express themselves in an act of horrible destruction. At the climax, the chamber's one source of light, the lamp, traditional symbol of imaginative creativity, becomes an implement of vicious torture and the abused, caged victim has been goaded into inhuman, all-too-human victimizer and executioner. For those who cannot separate the story from their knowledge of Poe's life and death, perhaps the most painful turn is the sense that, whatever the origins in Poe's drinking, imaginative blocking, and difficulty in writing, whatever the actual tangle of rights and wrongs, one of our most gifted writers was impelled at the end of his life to image his career in just this way. He stresses imprisonment, primarily his own and in reaction that of the public he imagines in his control, chained and burned to death.

Both as an artist contemptuously at odds with a public he nonetheless depends on for support and as a man charged with powerful, unacceptable feelings, Poe was motivated to develop techniques of symbolic indirection. In “Hop-Frog” and in his detective fiction, in his stories of revenge and his brilliant studies of the buried underside of the self, as Melville and Hawthorne do in their ways, Poe combines the techniques of the inmate with his own personally and socially revealing themes and imagery of imprisonment and punishment.

Written at almost the same time as “Hop-Frog,” the first paragraph of The Scarlet Letter is dominated by the image of a nineteenth-century prison, not a seventeenth-century jail, which was like an ordinary house.² Hawthorne's prison resembles one of the new penal institutions Americans had pioneered along with everything else. Unlike the domestic architecture of the seventeenth-century jail, the prison in The Scarlet Letter has a massive oak door, iron spikes, and it is aligned with the “bearded men” who rule the society and who also appear in the first sentence of the novel. These iron-like, bearded men, their prison, and the scaffold define and unify the society of The Scarlet Letter. Characterized in this way the society tells us much more about Hawthorne's sense of his nineteenth-century America than about the Seventeenth Century. Hawthorne needed the disguise of the past to free his imagination so that he could create what is basically a contemporary drama. It is not simply that he needed to escape the detection of the keepers but also that the keepers were part of his own identity. In “Benito Cereno” and “Hop-Frog” Melville and Poe seem fully conscious. To release his energy, however, Hawthorne had to disguise matters from a part of himself, as Poe does in stories like “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Like Melville's Babo and Poe's Hop-Frog, Hawthorne creates a costume drama. In his version the protagonists wear seventeenth-century dress but the structures they live in and embody emerge from Hawthorne's sense of the present.

As he shows in Chapter 21 of The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne knows that the first settlers were basically Elizabethan in their outlook, that they liked ornate clothing and the ceremonial pomp of traditional English society. But he chooses instead to emphasize a joyless, punitive society. As Winthrop tells us in his famous “A Modell of Christian Charitie,” for him and his first generation contemporaries what holds society together is the loving brotherhood of believers under God. When love fails, as it did when Winthrop was rejected as governor, he invokes the power of God. Through the medium of the people, Winthrop argues in his “Speech to the General Court,” God chooses the rulers the people are bound to obey by virtue of custom and divine authority. Even under the changes of the New World, for the founding generation the unifying force was the traditional outlook of the Old World, an outlook based on ancient patterns of authority and deference sanctioned by a deep commitment to God.

For Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, however, what holds society together is not religious belief, shared traditions, and a common way of life but rather the prison and the scaffold. As ceremonial centers they answer to Hawthorne's sense of a society lacking the traditional unifying sentiments and forced to rely primarily on punishment and repressive power. He is not giving a historically accurate portrayal of the seventeenth century and he is not giving a literal description of his nineteenth-century America but rather an image that emerges from the depths of his contemporary experience. Hawthorne's resonant image or myth comments suggestively on the grim end results of social tendencies that had started in the seventeenth century. Americans who had inaugurated their society and their characters on the basis of the Protestant temperament and possessive individualism had ended with what are for Hawthorne the unifying realities of the prison and the scaffold.³

The iron-like men who run the society and give it its temper are capable but insensitive, heartless. The prison and scaffold are wood but the society and its leaders are iron, a word that recurs again and again in Hawthorne's descriptions of the “iron arm,” the “iron links,” and the “iron framework” of official beliefs, character, and society. The prevailing punitive rigidity and heartlessness define the dominant qualities of the official work ethic society and its representative men, the keepers in what Hawthorne repeatedly presents as the prison-house of orthodox society. His gallery of the representative men who dominate this society and give it identity began with the parti-colored man in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and runs through such characters as Endicott in “The Maypole of Merrymount,” Peter Hovenden in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” and Baglioni in “Rappaccini's Daughter.” It includes the forefathers and all they come to stand for in “The Custom-House sketch.” Judge Pyncheon of The House of the Seven Gables is cut from the same iron pattern. Throughout, the historical and geographical settings are the occasion for what is primarily a contemporary American portrait. In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” Hawthorne had explored the impact of a rapidly changing society whose stable institutions and authority figures were being undermined. In The Scarlet Letter he shifts the focus away from social change and creates an image of the rigid, repressive power that for him continued to exist. From some points of view Jacksonian America was a society in flux; from other points of view official society continued to bear down on those who were at odds with the prevailing values.

In The Scarlet Letter Hester is the main alternative to the masculine-dominated official society. In contrast to the imagery and attitudes associated with society, Hester is characterized as rich and voluptuous; she has a passionate temperament which expresses itself in the oriental luxuriance of the letter and Pearl's clothing. Before it is repressed, her dark hair flows. Fluidity and passion, a depth of creative, sexual energy characterizes Hester, especially when she is freed from the deadening effects of the letter, from the rigid official punishment it in part represents. In contrast to the drab rigidities of the prison world, Hester speculates freely and dangerously and expresses herself in color and in the sexuality which animates her art—her elaboration of the letter and her other creations—and which precipitates the crisis the novel turns on.

As a free, sexualized, independent woman, speculative intelligence, and artistic creator, Hester is an embodiment of a compelling individualism at odds with the socially conventional version and close to Hawthorne's deepest feelings about his own creativity and identity. That he should treat Hester ambivalently reveals the most intimate strains which animate Hawthorne's imagination. He does not make matters easy for himself: he does not soften his view of the dominant, orthodox society as a way of blurring the oppositions and making his reservations about Hester more palatable. The society's accommodations to Hester do not alter the basic character of the society or Hawthorne's generally critical view of it or his ambivalent treatment of Hester.

In view of his deep reservations about her, it is significant that Hawthorne allows Hester's mystic, passionately charged scarlet letter to become an organizing center and communal point of reference, an alternative one to the official symbols of the scaffold and prison. The scarlet letter embodies both the rebellious energies of the artist and the official attitudes of the society the artist both accepts and subverts.

After her formal release from prison, as she becomes vulnerable to the standards of domesticity, common-sense, and the Protestant decorum, Hester's nature is truncated.⁴ She cannot directly express her passionate energy in acts of love with Dimmesdale or in intellectual and imaginative creations growing out of personal fulfilment. Her creative passions are instead repressed and express themselves overtly only in the art of her needlework. The richly elaborated, mystic letter and Pearl's dress are especially subversive of the official, common-sense, work ethic standards. Hester is like a prisoner forced to express herself in a symbolic code to escape the censorship of the authorities. She keeps the surface barely within tolerable limits and charges her message with implications she is partly aware of, partly unaware of. This combination also applies to Hawthorne, who has his own complex reasons for expressing himself indirectly through the techniques of the inmate.

In The Discovery of the Asylum David Rothman analyzes the total institutions the Jacksonian reformers created to discipline and reform deviants. Like the inmates in the new prisons, reform schools, and mental institutions, Hester is compelled to repress her sexuality even more fully than her creativity, which at least has the outlet of the subsistence and charity work she is allowed. After she dons the scarlet letter “the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand” and her form,” though still “majestic,” no longer inspires “Passion.”⁵ Explicitly, the missing quality is “tenderness” but the imagery of brands and fire suggests sexuality as well. In its official social dimension the scarlet letter represents the pressure of the society's rigid hostility to the warm passion and defiant individualism Hester embodies. She is truncated by this hostility, is affected in the most intimate recesses of her being, but in a modified, indirect way she continues to express the defiant energy of what in “The Custom-House Sketch” Hawthorne calls “the inmost Me” (p. 4). The narrator reminds us that a “magic touch” may still revive the “woman” in Hester (p. 164). In the forest scene the novelist shows that Hester is still passionately alive and responsive. What revives her, however, is not a magic touch, since Dimmesdale is much too passive, but Hester's ability to love and express her love, not in a safe but in a dangerous, vital way.

Under the influence of the official stigma of the letter and all it represents, Hester is changed and her relation to others and to society is changed. Under the influence of the letter Hester is isolated but also tied, related, to society. Hawthorne's language is significant. “The chain that bound her,” he has his narrator say in Chapter 5, “was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but never could be broken” (p. 80). The “chain” is reminiscent of “the instinct,” “not love,” that in “The Custom-House Sketch” Hawthorne says binds him to Salem (p. 11). It is also reminiscent of the “strong traits of their nature which,” Hawthorne also says in “The Custom-House Sketch” “have intertwined themselves with mine,” the traits of his iron-like forefathers (p. 10). When the letter in its official, punitive role is foremost, when Hawthorne is answering to the iron-like, orthodox demands intertwined in his nature, and especially when for Hester the possibility of genuine love has been blighted by the “iron arm” of the official code, Hawthorne characterizes Hester's relations in the imagery of “iron links.”

In the forest scene, however, Hawthorne imagines an alternative to the “iron links” the scarlet letter and the “iron arm” of society have forged within and between Hester and others. He allows Hester's passionate sexuality to show in the revived flow of her dark hair. Her smile has the requisite “tenderness” to modulate the full power of her passion but the “gushing” and “glowing” and the revival of “her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty” establish her uncensored depths and energy (p. 202). The instinct, love, establishes a vital relation that brings Hester to life again, reinvigorates Dimmesdale, and temporarily releases him from “the dungeon of his own heart” (p. 201). This act of love and the relations it establishes cannot be characterized in the mechanical imagery of a prisoner's chain with iron links because it is alive, passionate, and changing. For a magic instant Hawthorne imagines a vital union animated from the depths and promising fulfilment on this earth. Given the society he knew, this vital union is necessarily in opposition to it and perhaps to some extent to all constituted societies. But it suggests the living center social relations might flow from. At the center of the forest scene Hester is, significantly, not isolated and she is not selfish. She acts from her depths for herself and for Dimmesdale. It is revealing that the only alternative to her unifying, passionate love that Hawthorne can imagine is the iron arm and the iron links of repression, punishment, and guilt, of the iron framework of society as a supporting but isolating prison.

Even Hawthorne, the most skeptical of our great mid-nineteenth-century American writers, has an intense intuition of the individualistic sources from which a new kind of social union might develop. The heart of the forest scene is Hawthorne's equivalent of the sexually vitalized “love is a kelson of the creation” of Section Five of “Song of Myself.” It is his equivalent of the erotically charged realization in “The Grand Armada” in Moby-Dick that “deep down and deep inland, there I bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.” But for Hawthorne as for Whitman, the insight, for all its threat to the conventional social order, is more alive than Melville's to the possibility of a new kind of society energized from the personal depths of love. It thus seems especially American that, like his great contemporaries, Hawthorne is unable to imagine the living, nonrepressive community this individualism might animate and develop in. In view of his fears about her energies, no wonder Hawthorne feels impelled to reincarcerate Hester for her full term.

Except for the marvellous interlude in the forest and with the exception of her troubled relation to Pearl, throughout the novel Hester is accordingly isolated from her intimates as well as from society. Because her passion is threatening, Hawthorne makes Hester pay for it but the isolation itself is not so much a punishment Hawthorne imposes on her as an acknowledgment of the isolated position in American society of a person like Hester. Her isolation from society is an intensified version of the isolation Hawthorne had experienced, in a modified form continued to experience, and had repeatedly imagined as characteristic of his fictional creators. But this isolation also has more general sources and implications.

As the recipient of the punitive ostracism of her society, Hester reveals that American tendency Tocqueville had recently analyzed. Tocqueville saw the majority as so powerful in America and the impulse toward equality, toward uniformity, as so basic that views conflicting with the majority's were, he believed, suppressed before they were born and if not were punished through an informal but effective system of social ostracism.⁶ Granted that the system was imperfect and that sects, splits, and fragmentation were dominant characteristics of Hawthorne's period. Still, the tendency Tocqueville noted is also significant. It is suggestive that Tocqueville began his American investigations as a student of the new penal institutions. For him as for Hawthorne, America is in significant ways a prison, on the one hand enforcing uniformity and punishing deviants, on the other hand driving people into the solitary confinement of their hearts.

In The Scarlet Letter Hester's situation is also similar to that of a prisoner in one of the institutions designed to reform the deviant through isolation. Once she is released from prison Hester has the freedom of the grounds but “she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere.” While it punishes and seeks to reform her by chronic public exhortation and social pressure, society may also be seeking to protect itself from contagion. The official hope, however, was not that of the seventeenth-century Puritan but of his nineteenth-century successor, the Jacksonian reformer. The official theory was that in isolation, removed from the possibility of corrupting and corruption, the prisoner would turn inward and the basic good of human nature would manifest itself in a reformed citizen. Hawthorne, however, realizes that the rich, dark depths of Hester's nature are more troublesomely complicated than the reformers assumed. His own view is divided. He or his narrator repeatedly warn us against the refractory energy in Hester that refuses to be repentant, that continually belies her surface acquiescence and repeatedly makes a mockery of the moral-spiritual reform Hawthorne simultaneously believes in and needs to deny. Finally the threat of Hester's defiant passion was too strong. Hawthorne shows the effects on Hester of her imprisonment, shows the values that are blighted—her beauty, her creative vitality, her sexuality—and returns her to the prison of his society.

Based on his complex experience and finally on his experience as an artist in America, in The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne, too, came to see America as a prison. To allow Hester that release he imagines would have left unsatisfied Hawthorne's need for a balance between forest freedom and the iron framework of a supporting, imprisoning society. It would also have falsified his basic experience as an artist in America. In his own life Hawthorne's first term of incarceration was one he chose himself, that ten year period of relatively solitary confinement in his mother's house in Salem. This experience colored his outlook thereafter and made him sensitive to a dimension of his society Tocqueville, himself a student of penal institutions, also found ways of characterizing. Hawthorne had special reasons for simultaneously communicating and concealing in the manner both of the symbolic artist and of the prisoner. In dealing with the threatening sexual themes and the moral and social doubts of his early stories, Hawthorne had discovered what was good for him at the very beginning of his career and after twenty years of experience in the marketplace and with his forefathers behind and within him and with his wife and his high-minded friends at the Old Manse, he had additional reasons for perfecting the skills of symbolic indirection.

In The Scarlet Letter he brought the themes and techniques of the inmate to fulfilment. But in chastening and reincarcerating Hester, Hawthorne also acknowledged his own fears of the rebellious creative powers she embodies. In the concluding processional he has Dimmesdale ignore Hester, side with the powerful keepers who rule society, and die. Prefigured in his treatment of Hester and Dimmesdale is Hawthorne's diminished will to explore his deepest preoccupations. With declining energy he nonetheless continued to deal with the situation of the imprisoned artist, from Clifford in The House of the Seven Gables through the abortive, undeveloped figures in the confined rooms and dungeons of the late romances. He came to prefer the novels of Trollope to his own books, although he knew he himself was unable to write realistic fiction. The techniques of the inmate had allowed him to survive, to satisfy his contradictory impulses, and to conceal and reveal, subvert and accept simultaneously. At the end of his career, at a banquet of the Saturday Club, surrounded by the literary friends of a lifetime, Hawthorne, Henry James, Sr. observed, “had the look all the time … of a rogue in a company of detectives.”⁷ At the end, when the techniques of the inmate had become a liability, under the surveillance of his inner and outer detectives this rogue finally escaped into immortality.

Notes

1. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), V, 219. Subsequent quotations will appear in the text.

2. David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), analyzes the changing architecture of American jails and prisons and establishes the pioneering role of the Jacksonian reformers in developing the new prisons, reform schools, and mental institutions.

3. For background on possessive individualism, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). For analysis of the Protestant temperament, see Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Belief, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977).

4. For background on the developing ideology of domesticity during Hawthorne's period, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1978). For a discussion of the Protestant Etiquette, see John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 5-10.

5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. William Charvat (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1962), p. 163. Subsequent quotations will appear in the text.

6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1945), I, 264-280.

7. Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family: A Group Biography (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 479.