Chapter Eleven—
Double Marriage, Double Adultery

At the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter Hester Prynne returns to her lonely seaside cottage and becomes a counselor to persons suffering "the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion": women, in particular, come to her asking "why they were so wretched, and what the remedy." Hester shares her faith that the miseries accompanying intimate relationships will someday be corrected at their source. "At some brighter period . . . a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." Hester foretells that "the angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman" and recognizes that the "destined prophetess" must be "lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end" (CE 1:263). Thus Hawthorne's narrative conclusion hails the advent of the domestic ideal, with the domestic angel as the embodiment of its sacred truth.

This passage culminates a rhetorical framework that quietly governs The Scarlet Letter from the outset, in which the anguish of the principal characters results from the inopportune social arrangements in which they are fated to live. Yet what Hawthorne proposes as the future remedy for these dilemmas is actually their source: the domestic ideal produces the "mighty trouble"

that Hester's story depicts. The details of Hawthorne's setting—and such ancillary figures as the Reverend Wilson, Governor Bellingham, and Mistress Hibbins—provide elaborate linkages with seventeenth-century Puritan Boston. But Hester, Arthur, Roger, and Pearl have no counterparts in the colonial record, and the torments they suffer are characteristic of nineteenth-century family life.^[1]

In the opening scaffold scene Hawthorne includes a young wife holding her child by the hand, who serves as a harbinger of the coming revelation. In contrast to the "manlike" Puritan women who demand a harsher penalty, so that a proper lesson will be enforced upon the public, the young mother focuses sympathizing attention on Hester's inner pain. The view of punishment she represents is that of Sophia's child-rearing practices as well as that deployed in response to violations of the law: Victorian criminal "corrections" sought to rehabilitate criminals through an inward discipline, rather than use their bodies as instruments of public instruction enforced by terror. "Is there no virtue in woman," protests a witness to Hester's public shame, "save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows?" (CE 1:52). As the "iron-visaged" matrons loudly debate what additional sufferings Hester should undergo—a public flogging, or perhaps death—the young mother pleads with them: "Do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her heart" (54).^[2]

Hawthorne himself denounces the public pillory as an "outrage" against "our common nature" because it makes a public spectacle of the suffering conscience and forbids the culprit "to hide his face for shame." In Hester's case the outrage is redoubled since the initial wrongdoing has an intimate character, involving "the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life" (CE 1:55–56).

Placed on the scaffold by Puritan law, Hester is compelled to express her essential womanly nature by engaging in conduct that violates it, that is, by taking a public stand. She has "fantastically embroidered and illuminated" the letter so as to turn the tables on her accusers, reversing the meaning of the sentence they imposed. "Why, gossips," says one of the vindictive crones, "what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?" (CE 1:53–54). Hester's public defiance, which paradoxically asserts the sacred privacy of intimate relations, culminates in her refusal to divulge her lover's name. Dimmesdale makes explicit the underlying principle, albeit for reasons of his own, in affirming "that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight,

and in presence of so great a multitude" (65). Hester's quandary—the necessity of asserting her nature by wronging it—introduces the dilemma that pervades The Scarlet Letter . Such vexations will not be typical of the future dispensation, once the "new truth" has been revealed. Or so Hawthorne's rhetorical schema implies.

This thematic system was not Hawthorne's invention; it was a conventional feature of the argument by which the domestic ideal became established. George B. Loring's early review of The Scarlet Letter observed that in former ages marriage was merely a legal obligation, the "bulwark of hereditary rights, and a bond for a deed of conveyance." But there is now a true form of marriage, Loring declared, founded on obligations "more sacred and binding than any which have been born of the statute-book" (Crowley, 170). Harriet Martineau's demand that marriage should be separated from "its impious alliance with worldly interest" replays these issues. "Designed to protect the sanctity of the love of one man for one woman," marriage "has become the very means of obstructing such love, and destroying the sanctity of it." Adultery is the inevitable result: "Is anyone irrational enough to expect fidelity in marriages thus made in markets?" (Martineau, n.p.).

Hester Prynne has two husbands, in keeping with these divergent conceptions of marriage. Roger is her husband at law; and Hester frankly declares that when she married him, she "felt no love, nor feigned any" (CE 1:74). Between Hester and Arthur, by contrast, there exists a bond of sacred love. The adultery they committed against Roger was the consummation of their soul-marriage, which they passionately reassert after years of punishment. "What we did had a consecration of its own," Hester cries out. "We felt it so! We said so to each other!" (195). Hawthorne unobtrusively yet firmly endorses this self-consecrating marriage by speaking routinely of Roger as Hester's "former husband" (167).^[3]

In light of her soul-marriage to Arthur, Hester comes to realize that her sexual relationship to Roger was a defiling and degrading experience. She recalls with convulsive loathing the scenes of their life together and "deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side." In short, her relation to Roger was adulterous: "He betrayed me!" Hester concludes bitterly, "He has done me worse wrong than I did him" (CE 1:176).

Inherent in Hester's double marriage is a double adultery. The legal and public bond of matrimony establishes a requirement of sexual fidelity that the narrative questions but never discards. Yet marriage as a communion of souls is equally hedged about with sacred obligations, against which Roger offended when he took Hester to his lukewarm bed. He is the victim of the adultery between Hester and Arthur; yet his relation to Hester is revealed as a betrayal when judged by the sacred bond joining her to Arthur. The Puritan community is thus guilty of enforcing a wrongful standard: Hester's youthful mistake could be corrected in a healthier social arrangement, where she could obtain a divorce from Roger and proceed to formalize at law the true marriage of her heart; the development of matrimonial legislation since the early nineteenth century bears witness to the social force of this rhetoric.^[4]

Yet the conflict between "worldly" requirements and the claims of the "heart" was sharpened, not moderated, by the emergence of the domestic ideal. The ostensible progress from a former to a future social condition bespeaks a tension within domesticity itself. Colonial life was not free of marital distress; and the same is true of its European antecedents. Indeed, the Hebrew and Greek literatures at the origins of Western culture portray the manifold tragic dilemmas inherent in family relations. But The Scarlet Letter depicts the quandaries of its own age and sets forth the heraldic emblem of middle-class marriage in its final sentence: "On a field, sable, the letter a, gules" (CE 1:26). Hester is enmeshed in a matrimonial adultery generic to the domestic ideal; her two marriages dramatize a conflict in the terms of its constitution.

Students of domesticity have described the troubles produced by the sharp division between "home" and "world." The expectation of deepened emotional satisfactions within marriage appeared simultaneously with the separation of the "spheres," so that husbands and wives were driven apart by their occupations—and by the temperaments suited to those occupations—even as they sought increased marital intimacy. As John Mack Faragher observes, this "marriage-defining conflict" was complicated by the difference in social power between men and women; like slaves attending to the personal needs of their owners, women formed intimate relationships on terms set by men. It follows that the definition of "woman's sphere" is itself a male creation and serves male needs, however much countervailing power it may afford the subordinated sex (1–3).^[5]

Hester's difficulties arise, accordingly, from a problem deeper than the conflict between legal obligations and heart's desire. Her discrepant marriages subject her to an internally divided masculinity, to Roger and Arthur

as fragments of a divided manhood. These reciprocal cuckolds spend more time with each other than either spends with Hester, and they are more intimately involved in each other's lives than in hers. Hawthorne tells us that they took "long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest" (CE 1:123). "They discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal to themselves," so that a "kind of intimacy" (125) grew up between them, from which Hester was excluded. They decide to live together, and in the end they die together. Hester's two husbands are inseparable opposites; they are figures of the split manhood that sustained the domestic ideal, and Hester cannot have one without the other.

Hester demonstrates her continuing love for Arthur in her refusal to name him before the community and in the revival of their passion that takes place in the forest, where they agree to make a new life for themselves elsewhere. Hawthorne does not fail to observe that this faithfulness renews her adultery against Roger. Yet Hester also keeps faith with Roger, in response to a matrimonial claim that invokes not merely law but the intimacy of the domestic bond. Roger demands what Hester had given Arthur, namely her promise to keep secret their marital relation, and he includes Arthur within that sacred privacy. "Elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where thou art, and where he is." Roger blackmails Hester into keeping their secret by threatening a public revenge against Arthur, whose identity he appears to have discerned from the outset: "His fame, his position, his life, will be in my hands. Beware!" (CE 1:76). This deadly interior menace deepens and complicates the three-way bond of "home" that links Hester, Arthur, and Roger, a tormented and inwardly conflicted intimacy in which faithfulness and adultery are interfused.

While she was living at the Old Manse, Sophia quarreled with the view—put forward by her sister Elizabeth—that her relation to Nathaniel was a union of "self-sufficing worlds." Elizabeth had derived this marital ideal from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she thought it applicable to several marriages; to Sophia, however, it was a flat contradiction in terms. "No one who has ever become one with another being, as true husband & wife must

become if really united, will ever, can ever, say that each is wholly independent of the other, except intellectually. Heart & spirit are forever indissolubly one." If a husband and wife "be indeed twin souls, if they belong together, they are no longer each 'self-sufficing.' Waldo Emerson knows not much of love. He has never yet said any thing to show that he does. He is an isolation—He has never yet known what union meant with any soul."^[6] Sophia's jab at Emerson is not only personal; it goes to the marital dilemmas generated by the ideal of self-made manhood, of which Emerson was a classic exemplar.

Sophia is saying in effect that the Emersons have an adulterous legal marriage, like that of Hester and Roger; and in bringing this charge, Sophia echoes a domestic anguish that Waldo and Lidian did not conceal. Margaret Fuller visited the Emersons in 1842 and noted Lidian's pain: her "hope that Waldo's character will alter, and that he will be capable of an intimate union." Waldo himself feigned no such capacity; he stated frankly that "the soul knows nothing of marriage in the sense of permanent union between two personal existences"; and this view was in keeping with his broader doctrines of the self-sufficient soul (Myerson, 330–332). "Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse," he had proclaimed in "Self-Reliance." "Say to them, 'O father, O mother, O wife . . . I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's.' " The self-reliant man agrees to remain "the chaste husband of one wife," Emerson concedes, but his soul belongs to himself alone (Whicher, 160).

Emerson enshrined psychic self-sovereignty as the essential manly virtue and set his face against any impulse or duty that threatened it. "Nothing is at last sacred," he declared "but the integrity of your own mind" (Whicher, 149). Yet maintaining this self-directed inward coherence is incompatible with the union of souls that true marriage demands and sexual intercourse within true marriage enacts.

The dread of sexuality—including marital sexuality—as a threat to masculine self-sovereignty was not invented in America, nor is it solely a product of the rising middle class. But this concern was sharply accentuated in the early national period, and it became a middle-class obsession as the culture of individual competition became dominant. John Adams proposed that the national seal of the United States should be engraved with a scene depicting the Choice of Hercules, the hero's decision to pursue mighty endeavors rather than the "Effeminacy" of amorous dalliance. In Adams's recurrent discussions, sexual desire became an inclusive metaphor for activities menac-

ing the self-disciplined pursuit of manly distinction: "let no Girl, no Gun, no Cards, no flutes, no Violins, no Dress, no Tobacco, no Laziness, decoy you from your books," he sternly counseled himself. Adams condemned wasting time and spirit in "unmanly Pleasures," which he obsessively details: "a softening, enervating, dissipating series of hustling, pratling, Poetry, Love, Courtship, Marriage." Adams's anxiety is projected into fretting over his children's future: "I sometimes tremble when I hear the syren songs of sloth, least they should be captivated with her bewitching Charms, and her soft, insinuating Musick" (Greven, 246).

The discourse of self-sufficient manhood is a duet, more richly realized in Adams than in Emerson; yet the two voices are audible in both. The division in Adams's mind appears in the caressing eloquence with which he lists the allurements he seeks to repudiate; he is enormously attracted to poetry, love, courtship, and marriage, as well as to laziness and his gun, and he implicitly acknowledges the psychic wealth they offer. Emerson, by contrast, reduces such distractions to the "deceived and deceiving" presences that he dismisses in the act of summoning them up: "O father, O mother, O wife." Like Odysseus himself among the "syren songs," Emerson does not allow himself to hear the "soft, insinuating Musick."

This anxious dialectic, in which manly self-control speaks against a disconcerting yet alluring prospect of self-loss, is dramatized in Hawthorne's presentation of Roger and Arthur. The split between law and the heart, as between the spheres of world and home, now appears in the polarization of male selfhood. Hester's "worldly" marriage to Roger, with its legal authorization, joins her to a figure of notable self-possession; Arthur languishes, almost overwhelmed by his emotional impulses, taking a voluptuous pleasure even in his spasms of guilt. Yet neither marriage is visible to the public; both are contained within the sacred compacts that Hester keeps secret. She is an antitype of the domestic angel, in whom the moral anatomy of that role becomes visible, the queen and victim of a domestic intimacy given structure by the interior contradictions of self-sovereign manhood.

The Scarlet Letter drastically heightens the psychosexual drama of manhood split by desire; it portrays an intense inward battle along lines drawn up in a literature excluded from the canonical precincts inhabited by Adams and Emerson: the literature of masturbation phobia that burgeoned in the 1830s and 1840s. Masturbation sharply focused the interior contradictions

of manly self-reliance; instead of setting men against violins and tobacco and wives, it put them at war with their own bodies.^[7]

Masturbation is both a failure and a triumph of sexual self-command. Like sexual activity generally, it involves yielding to impulses that are not under voluntary control, which express themselves in erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions if orgasm is successfully avoided during waking hours. Masturbation is also a form of sexual self-sufficiency; it requires no entangling liaisons or commitments and no financial cost. The effort to realize oneself as a self-made man is ultimately self-liquidating because it embraces contradictory requirements that become inescapable in the presence of desire.^[8] Masturbation thus came to possess contaminating power for men who sought to incarnate self-sovereign self-control.

As the ideal of self-sufficient manliness began to develop historically, masturbation was flagged early as a critical issue; in 1724 Onania appeared, with a subtitle that gave the deed its definitive new name: Self-Pollution. Onania presents the two voices that carry on a tireless dialogue throughout the succeeding tradition, the voice of the author and that of the self-polluted self. Onania includes letters, presented as the work of afflicted readers, with the author's replies appended, so that the work has an epistolary form, which remained standard in this literature well into the nineteenth century.^[9] Brief pamphlets of admonition as well as learned treatises present the characteristic duet.

The voice of the author is self-contained and authoritative, probing the disgusting morass of self-pity, self-loathing, and dissolving ethical fiber from which the other voice speaks. Here is a nineteenth-century instance of the counterpoint: "My constitution . . . is broken down, and my mind, as well as body, completely enervated. I am haunted day and night with lascivious thoughts and dreams; suspicious of my friends and disgusted with myself. My memory has lost its power—unable to fix my attentions—my mind is filled with terrible forebodings—fear of insanity, and at times it has cost me a continual effort to retain my reason." In such squalor the author finds evidence of a stern and inflexible order: "We cannot, with impunity, violate the laws of our being. This organic law of our formation, is imperative and abiding—no abuse of it will go unpunished—suffering will follow, if it be not scrupulously obeyed" (Woodward, 8, 10).

Hawthorne's Chillingworth likewise pursues scientific knowledge with cold composure and comes to focus that pursuit obsessively on Dimmesdale's soul while Dimmesdale is ravaged and enervated by the conviction that his existence is "utterly a pollution and a lie" (CE 1:143). These dichoto-

mous psychic constellations define a world of male erotic experience: Roger's self-possession and Arthur's self-loathing are both forms of masculine sexuality.

Roger's emotional containment is itself compulsive, as appears in the opening scene. He sees his wife on the scaffold, with another man's child in her arms; this spectacle triggers an involuntary effort at self-control. "A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature" (CE 1:61). Roger masters this passion by exercising his "will," but so "instantaneously" that the effort itself is marked as automatic. Momentarily visible is a snake-like writhing, which intimates the erotic energy invested both in the hidden feelings and in the compulsion to keep them concealed. The "keen and penetrative" glance that precedes this "convulsion" likewise bespeaks the sexual passion Chillingworth has incorporated into his commitment to a ruthless self-possessed rationality. As Frederick Crews aptly remarked, Roger's libido sciendi is heavily charged with libido (126).

From the outset of his researches into the identity of Hester's beloved, Roger looks forward to the crescendo of sexual excitement that will mark his progress. "There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!" (CE 1:75). His desire for such moments of delicious tremor is Roger's chief motive in pursuing Arthur. Hawthorne describes nothing in the way of a real investigation: no other suspects are even considered, and Roger makes no effort to dig up tangible evidence. He satisfies himself, instead, by torturing Arthur into bursts of unguarded feeling. "It is as well to have made this step" Roger gloats, after his questions drive Arthur into a rage. "See, now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!" (137).

Hawthorne repeatedly draws attention to the unconscious compulsion that takes control of Roger's seemingly self-regulated life. "He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem. . . . But, as he

proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again, until he had done all its bidding" (CE 1:129). Yet the covert eroticism of Roger's investigation bespeaks the autophobic sexuality that had marked his earlier life. Roger's compulsive self-containment—his inability to yield himself to Hester—lies at the heart of his failure to consummate a passionate union with her. "Let men tremble," Hawthorne warns "to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality" (176–177).

As sexual anxiety governs Roger's craving, so it generates the emotional provender that Arthur serves up. As the clergyman writhes in the torture of a self-abused selfhood, Roger implicitly recognizes his own prospective plight, as does the community at large. Arthur provides his congregation, indeed, a diluted form of the gratification Roger derives from observing him, offering the public a chance to participate vicariously in the torment of his inner life. Arthur's sermons are powerful because of the emotional burden in his "tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken" voice (CE 1:67). His listeners are attuned to a "cry of pain" that softens their hearts, no matter what his ostensible topic may be (243).

Arthur's clerical selfhood is an anguished hymn of erotic submission, tacitly acknowledging that passion compels him to violate the principles of male virtue. The manliness he has polluted through yielding is the same as Chillingworth has demonized through unconscious denial and the quest for vicarious fulfillment. This specific form of pollution—the vice correlative to just such a manliness—gives Arthur "sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs" (CE 1:142).

Arthur knows, moreover, that he nurses and cultivates his desire in the act of repenting it, so that his displays of righteous self-abuse are themselves masturbatory and strongly solicit an erotic response. "The virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so embued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar" (CE 1:142).

I do not propose Roger and Arthur as neurotics in the conventional Freudian sense, as though their professions of scientific curiosity and of moral suffering cover up an autonomous sexuality that they could learn to enjoy if only they had the courage to face their true feelings. They represent sexualities produced by the cultural formation that self-made men perforce inhabited, in which erotic sentiment was experienced in the forms of anguish Hawthorne depicts here.

The literary power of Hawthorne's portrayal results in part from the density of such local resonances. The pair dramatize an all-ramifying semantic interplay whose logic reaches across the boundaries separating distinct zones of social experience. Roger and Arthur display this reverberant centrality in relation to the split voices of Adams and Emerson and the intrapsychic hothouse of masturbation phobia. But their interaction also engages the public order of male endeavors, as figured in the emerging relation of the clergy and the medical profession.

Hawthorne's description of the living quarters of the two men underscores their rival eruditions. Arthur

piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals.

(CE 1:126)

Each learned man occupied "his own domain"; in Hawthorne's time the relation of the two domains was changing.

The disestablishment of religion in the United States involved more than the removal of the ordained ministry from the list of tax-supported institutions. The intellectual authority of the clergyman's professional stock-in-trade was critically damaged by the interminable theological disputes to which Hawthorne obliquely refers; and the emerging secular order of business and politics presented a host of issues that the knowledge of things divine could do little to explain. In the reshaping of the social landscape that separated the home from the world, the pastor found his professional place shifting into the domain of women.^[10]

During his stay at the Old Manse, Hawthorne encountered a Reverend Mr. Frost, who seemed blissfully unaware of occupying an effeminated role. "We certainly do need a new revelation," Hawthorne remarked, "for there

seems to be no life in the old one. Mr. Frost, however, is probably one of the best and most useful of his class; because no suspicion of the necessity of his profession . . . has hitherto disturbed him; and therefore he labors with faith and confidence, as ministers did a hundred years ago, when they had really something to do in the world" (CE 8:352). Dimmesdale's professional station, by contrast, offered a direct pathway to public authority. "Even political power," Hawthorne states, "was within the grasp of a successful priest" (CE 1:238). Dimmesdale, more akin to Mr. Frost than to his Puritan forebears, possesses the skills through which nineteenth-century ministers attained social power by exploiting the womanly domain to which they found themselves consigned.

Tender womanhood being exalted as the true expression of Christian love, pastors cultivated a sensitive life of sympathetic emotion that male denizens of the cold cruel world found it difficult to maintain. As women became leaders in the politics of local churches and in the proliferating system of volunteer organizations that churches sponsored, the preacher's ability to arouse the enthusiasm of women parishioners became essential to his professional success. The sexual conflicts of middle-class culture came to focus on the relationship between women and ministers, and when the spiritual, political, and erotic connections between shepherd and sheep were strongly mutual, they were likely to become explicit. The love affair of Henry Ward Beecher and his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton attained notoriety when it was revealed in 1872 because it dramatized issues concerning the meaning of "true" marriage and the sexually ambiguous character of the clergyman's role—precisely those Hawthorne had explored two decades earlier.

Victoria Woodhull, the advocate of sexual freedom who revealed the Beecher-Tilton affair to the public, extolled "the coming together of these two loving natures in the most intimate embrace" (Cott, Root, 260). Woodhull asserted that Beecher's deepest convictions were identical to her own but that he could not muster the courage to break with the "social slavery" he secretly despised. Woodhull's stand invokes the cultural logic at work in Sophia's assessment of Waldo and Lidian. In each case true marriage exists where loving natures are at one, and sexual intercourse is the outward and visible sign of that inward and spiritual union. Hawthorne's portrayal of the minister as a sex symbol strikes a chord that is still vibrating in American religious life.

The paradox in which anguished confessions of sin become incitements to sexual pleasure produced a related set of dilemmas for clergymen. The Reverend John Todd, who wrote voluminously about "manhood"—which

always already means sexual self-control—was quick to warn his readers against books that pollute the mind; and he was particularly alarmed about writing whose pornographic effect is covert or springs on readers before they can prepare themselves. He complains that gifted but perverted writers "adorn and conceal a path which is full of holes, through which you may drop into the chambers of death" (Barker-Benfield, 171). Yet Todd could not help realizing that his own treatises might inspire the depravities they condemn; and when he wrote directly about the "secret vice," he did so in Latin (169–170).

The Reverend Arthur Cleveland Coxe, in reviewing The Scarlet Letter, finds that Hawthorne exploits the opportunities for pornographic euphemism provided by the erotics of pious guilt. Coxe declines to convict Hawthorne as a "literary pimp," because his work is not coarse in its details, or indecent in its phraseology." But Hawthorne's very fastidiousness, Coxe finds, advances the work of corruption, as the blunt language of the Bible does not: "Damsels who shrink at the reading of the Decalogue, would probably luxuriate in bathing their imagination in the crystal of . . . [The Scarlet Letter 's] delicate sensuality" (Kesterson, 44). Coxe goes on to describe his encounter with a group of schoolgirls who were polluting themselves with Hawthorne's "delicately immoral" story by sharing their enthusiasm for it. The girls agreed it was about "a very fascinating young preacher," and a "hateful creature named Chillingworth, who persecuted the said preacher" (44–45).^[11] My point here is not (or not only) that Hawthorne was scolded by the champions of prudery, and not that he refashioned the erotic conventions of his time into an autonomous work of art, but that his work fiercely intensifies the ambivalent sexual rhetoric that informed the responses both of the Reverend Mr. Coxe and of the schoolgirls.

The sexual anxieties that express themselves in the dilemmas of middle-class clergyman are also at work in the emerging science of sexuality, which became a province of the medical profession.

Chillingworth's professional character reflects the displacement of the minister as a counselor to sick souls and the acquisition of that role by physicians. John and Robin Haller observe that the medical doctor "had more opportunity than any other person outside the family circle to enter it on terms of intimacy," becoming "a party to family secrets in the natural course of his duties" (The Physician and Sexuality, x). The physician also enjoyed authority as the possessor of scientific truth, which increased in power and scope as the credibility of theological knowledge deteriorated. The psychoanalytic movement, now so multifarious, had its origins in Sigmund Freud's insistence that he had created a verifiable "science of the

unconscious," to be based on conversations between doctors and persons suffering mental distress. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne indicates that the physician's power to gain knowledge of spiritual matters was well advanced by mid-century, especially if he was skilled in exploiting the confessional qualities of the diagnostic interview:

A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more,—let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy, as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if, to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognized character as a physician;—then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark, but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.

(CE 1:124)

For all its claim to objective scientific authority, however, medical literature retained the language of sexual disgust. "A Brief and Intelligible View of the Nature, Origin and Cure of Tubercular Disease,"—a title dispassionate in tone—finds the source of such a disease in masturbation, which is characterized as a "polluting stream" that befouls the most genteel. Even those "who have been surrounded by every thing that could inspire the heart with sentiments of virtue and purity, have desecrated the scene . . . by indulgence in a vice, in view of which angels . . . weep, and creation sighs" (Rosenberg, 136). Like Roger Chillingworth, presumptively disinterested investigators of this "disease" found themselves enmeshed in a loathing fascination, and prescriptions for cure were often sadistic.

Leopold Deslandes advised that the masturbator should be placed in a straitjacket, with his feet tied apart, in such a way that his penis would not be tickled by his thighs. Deslandes also recommended the use of a "genital cage," which secured the penis and scrotum within a metal truss, to be held in place by springs (Haller and Haller, 207–208). Other practitioners employed bloodletting and applied leeches and heated pneumatic cups to the genitals, so as to draw forth "congestion." Inserting a metal ring in a hole punched through the foreskin was another form of treatment, as was cutting the foreskin apart with jagged scissors. Red iron, tartar emetic ointment, and Spanish fly-blister were applied to make the genitals painful to the touch, so that straying hands would not seek them out. "It is better . . . to endure any

physical discomfort," wrote Henry Guernsey, M.D., in his Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects, "than to sacrifice one's chastity" (Haller and Haller, 208–209).^[12]

The erotics of cruelty illustrated by such medical counsel answers to the clerical erotics of guilt. The root identity of these seemingly opposite psychic formations is evoked by Hawthorne's suggestion that the pain in Arthur's chest—and the wound presumably visible there—may have arisen equally from Arthur's self-torture and the poison vengefully administered by Roger.

Roger's sadistic gratification reaches its climax in the famous moment of his observing Arthur's naked breast. Like the "convulsion" Roger momentarily experienced when he first saw Hester on the scaffold and the "shudder" he expected to feel when he drew close to his quarry, this is a spasm in which involuntary responses take command. "What a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor!" (CE 1:138).

Figures of a manhood that is self-alienated under the pressure of sexual passion, Arthur and Roger live together and die together, leaving Hester to live on alone. In describing Roger's death, Hawthorne proposes that the hatred the two men bore each other testifies to a bond as deep as love. He wonders, indeed, "whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object" (CE 1:260). The factor linking hatred and love is the interdependence of the parties in question: both are "passions" of the sort that menace the self-containment of self-made men. Hawthorne's concluding remark emerges accordingly as a hope that this internal split in the male psyche might someday be healed. "In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister—mutual victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love" (260–261).

In the meanwhile, however, Hester's two marriages join her to inseparable figures who are convulsively at war; they dramatize a torment endemic to the sexual intimacy of middle-class marriage, the lurid balefire of matrimonial adultery.