"You cannot fix the scarlet letter on my breast!": women reading, writing, and reshaping the sexual culture of Victorian America

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2004 by Jesse F. Battan

At the end of the nineteenth-century cautionary tale, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne described the ultimate fate of the central characters of his novel. After a deathbed confession and reconciliation with little Pearl, the fruit of his illicit affair with Hester Prynne, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale dies and meets his maker. Deprived of the object of his anger, Roger Chillingworth, the cuckolded husband, loses his desire for revenge, and thus his reason to live, and quickly follows Dimmesdale into the grave. Hester soon after takes her leave from the site of her crime, only to return to New England years later and resume her role as moral outsider by voluntarily wearing the symbol of her shame, the scarlet A. In her later years, however, as Hawthorne noted, "the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too." In fact, Hester became a counselor to the local women who confessed the "sorrows and perplexities" they experienced because they, like she, had acted on their "sinful" passions or complained of the loneliness they felt because they were deprived of the opportunity to do so. They "came to Hester's cottage," as Hawthorne observed, "demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy!" Hester listened to their tales of emotional frustration and calmed their distress, assuring them "of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period ... a new truth would be revealed ... [that would] establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." (1)

In Hawthorne's hands, the scarlet A worn by Hester Prynne had two functions. It was a warning to Victorian society of the evils of hypocrisy and the destructive power of intolerance. It was also a vivid reminder to women of the consequences of sexual transgression. For in spite of her early hope that she would be the catalyst for this new emotional dispensation, Hawthorne gloomily concluded that the role of "angel and apostle of the coming revelation" would be reserved for a woman who is "lofty, pure, and beautiful," rather than one, like Prynne, who was "stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow." (2)

While Hawthorne's prediction may have held true in the social and moral universe he portrayed in his novel, throughout the last half of the nineteenth century it was precisely the kind of woman symbolized by Hester Prynne who would emerge as a confidant to the discontented and as a prophet of a regenerated emotional life. At the forefront of nineteenth-century efforts to reconstruct the erotic and emotional dimensions of private life were women who voluntarily took on the role of moral outsiders. Unlike Hester, however, they were a different sort of outcast. Women, such as Mary Gove Nichols, Victoria Woodhull, Angela Heywood, Lois Waisbrooker, and Lillian Harman, who were part of a small but active group of nineteenth-century reformers known as "Free Lovers," refused to accept society's categories of deviance and wear the scarlet letter. Instead, they challenged the emerging code of Victorian sexual respectability by providing encouragement to those who had been cast beyond the pale of "respectable" society, such as prostitutes, unwed mothers, bastard children, and adulterous wives. Unlike purity crusaders and moral rescue workers, the Free Lovers' goal was not to reform these objects of social scorn. Rather, through the public exposure of their ideas and experiences, they sought to teach them to overcome their sense of shame and, in pursuit of sexual autonomy, to bear their condition with pride.

In the nineteenth century, the Free Lovers occupied the fringes of even the most radical efforts to transform society. As a result, in the historiography of American reform they have either been ignored or portrayed as peripheral warriors in the battles for free thought and free speech, the struggles for women's rights, or the attempts by communitarians, anarchists, socialists, and spiritualists to create the ideal society. In recent years, however, scholars who have explored the intellectual, political, and legal history of the Free Love movement as well as the lives of some of its prominent leaders have redressed this neglect. (3) This essay, however, is less concerned with the Free Lovers' struggles against censorship, their political successes or failures, or their leaders' contributions to the history of reform. Instead, it explores what is perhaps the Free Lovers' most important contribution to our understanding of the past--their preoccupation with the emotional and erotic experiences of nineteenth-century men and women, and their willingness to discuss these experiences in public venues. Specifically, it examines their role as counselors and confessors to married and unmarried women who sought to unburden their hearts and describe in detail the contours of their emotional and erotic lives.