--Camille Paglia, from Sexual Personae

1. Classic American literature suffers from a sex problem. Genitality is evaded, or woman is excluded to facilitate what Leslie Fiedler [U.S. literary critic prominent in the 1960s] calls "the holy marriage of males." America's origins in sectarian Protestantism produced a circumscription of personae like that of republican Rome. Puritan personality, unitary and sharply bounded, was formed by the "rectitude" of acts, a masculine straightmeasure. Hawthorne shows patriarchal will waning in The House of the Seven Gables, with its decadent relics of shabby mansion and inherited curse.

2. America's sex problem began with the banishment of the maternal principle from Protestant cosmology. Medieval Mariolatry [adoration of the Virgin Mary] was and is a pagan survival that Protestantism, faithful to early Christianity, correctly opposes. But the absence of the mother from pioneer American values imaginatively limited a people living intimately with nature. A society enamored of the future sweeps away the mother, because she is the past, the state of remaining. [. . . ]

3. Poe's tales are Romantic rather than Gothic, because of the intense identification between himself and his narrators. His women have many names, but there is only one narrator, one voice. Poe's persona or Magister Ludi [Master of the Game] is the Romantic male heroine of passive suffering. His major women, Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella, tall, beautiful, and strangely erudite, are all versions of Coleridge's vampire Geraldine, who comes to fainting Christabel out of the night. But there is no sexual metathesis and hence no lesbian fantasy [in Poe]. Unlike Coleridge, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, Poe keeps his heroes to heir own gender. His women are hermaphrodite divinities, multiple faces of the black Venus. [. . .]

4. There is no sex instinct per se in Poe. His eroticism is in the paroxysms of suffering, the ecstatic, self-inflaming surrender to tyrant mothers. The narrator of Ligeia is a "child" beneath the "tutelage and "infinite supremacy" of the heroine[. . . .] Poe dreams of male eclipse by a Muse-like female mind. Ligeia mysteriously lacks a "paternal name," because woman is parthenogenetic, conceived and conceiving without male aid. The narrator cannot remember when or where he met her: she is the mother-shadow at the door of infant memory.

5. The sexual laws of Poe's world are so strict that a normal, feminine woman cannot survive in it. The narrator's second wife, blonde Lady Rowena, must be exterminated to restore the proper hierarchy of female over male. Raven-haired Ligeia, overcoming death by brute will power, returns from the grave to invade the body of her successor. I say Poe is rewriting Geraldine's rape of Christabel. He turns Coleridge's ritual scene back toward heterosexuality, as he does again in Morella, where a dead woman returns to obliterate her daughter. Ligeia ends in daemonic epiphany, a "hideous drama of revivification," as the narrator shrieks with joy and fear. There is a horrible burst of "huge masses of long and dishevelled hair . . . blacker than the wings of the midnight." Ligeia is mother nature and archaic night, an eruption of the pagan chthonian [that which is under the earth, in the realm of pre-life, and/or the dead]. She defies God's law of mortality because she, not he, is the resurrection and the life. Through the cataract of Medusan hair slowly open, robotlike, Ligeia's "cold, dead eyes" - the eyes by which Geraldine hypnotizes Christabel. What happens next? The story self-destructs. Poe's narrator is turned to stone by the Gorgon eye of nature, vomiting its coarse tangle of serpent-growth from the black soil.

6. [Paglia analyzes other stories by Poe: "Berenice" [the one with the teeth], "A Descent into the Maelstrom," "The Fall of the House of Usher," etc. Her conclusions are similar: that Poe was afraid of Nature (and therefore, of women and 'the feminine'), and was consequently fixated on the womb-tomb. "Poe's tales are pagan odes of invocation, realigning male imagination toward omnipotent female nature." Commenting on Poe's famous aphorism that "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic of the world," Paglia concludes that the beautiful Poe "woman is not feminine but masculine. Hence the death of the masculine principle is poetical, because it unites male and female, aggression and passivity, appearance and disappearance."

7. At almost the same moment [1830s and 40s in the U.S.], Nathaniel Hawthorne too was thinking of the goddess mother and her veils. The Minister's Black Veil (1836) is a bizarre exercise in transvestism. The Reverend Mr. Hooper greets his congregation with his face hidden by "a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet." People are perplexed or terrified. The minister stays in costume for the rest of his life. Assumption by critics that the veil is the burden of original sin unpersuasively imposes the moral and rational on the compulsive and uncanny. Hooper diagnoses the sexual incompleteness of Protestantism and remedies it by automedication. He does not seek concrete sexual experience. On the contrary, his refusal to remove the veil drives away his fiancŽe, whose loss he accepts with a coy smile. The gender-blurring veil is like the goddess' robe donned by male initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Devotee merges with nature mother by transsexual impersonation. The story acknowledges its pagan inspiration when Hooper, spooked by his veiled face in the mirror, rushes into the night: "The Earth, too, had on her Black Veil." So the minister's black veil is the female shadow of archaic night.

8. Hawthorne's tales ponder Christianity's uneasy relation to woman and nature. In The Birthmark, a scientist destroys his bride by trying to remove "the bloody hand" imprinted by nature on her cheek. In Rappaccini's Daughter, a sequestered girl is turned into a poison flower by her harsh flower, an Apollonian Jehovah playing dirty tricks in Eden. In The May-Pole of Merry Mount, Puritans squelch a town'' pagan revels in the woods. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne puts the mother at center stage. The adulteress Hester Prynne, infant at her bosom, is "the image of Divine Maternity," which only "a Papist among the crowd of Puritans would recognize." In other words, Hester is the Catholic Madonna drummed out of Protestantism. That the mother theme of The Scarlet Letter had something to do with Hawthorne's own mother is clear from the chronology of composition. After his mother's death on 31 July 1849, he fell ill from a "brain fever," from which recovery was slow. There is a gap in the notebooks from 30 July to 5 September, during which he began work on The Scarlet Letter. The book was completed the next February and published that year.

9. In "The Custom-House," the semi-autobiographical preface, Hawthorne introduces his antagonist persona, a Puritan patriarch, "that first ancestor" of his family who "still haunts me": "this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor, -- who came so early, with his Bible and his sword." In The Scarlet Letter, the exiled sexual persona of the saintly natural mother will defeat Hawthorne's despotic male progenitor, who carries a church on and in his head. Both preface and novella are twice their optimal length. The Scarlet Letter is overwritten. Its secret preoccupation is embedded, hidden, layered with anxious afterthought. The story is as obsessively embroidered as the red letter itself.

10. Hawthrone's tale of adultery is not like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, social novels. The Scarlet Letter is a Late Romantic dream poem, stirred by inner turbulence. Fiedler says "the carnal act" of adultery of "deprived of reality by being displaced in time" and is thus, "in the psychologist's sense, prehistoric." There is a striking diversion of affect away from Hester toward a homoerotic male dominator, "misshapen" Roger Chillingworth. Why did Hawthorne drag in this superfluous Mephisto character? Chillingworth's presence is a psychological necessity. By binding him to the alleged adulterer Arthur Dimmesdale (they are together "sleeping and waking"), Hawthorne leaves Hester and her daughter Pearl in a "magic circle" or "circle of seclusion," an archetypal female temenos [sacred space] no man can enter. Old Chillingworth is the cold, paralyzing hand of Hawthorne's father and forefathers. Hester is his divinized mother, half Virgin, half Magdalene. Adultery is the son's jealous charge against a mother abandoning him for his father. Hester is Antigone standing against the town, while Dimmesdale is Oedipus ruined by incest.

11. Hester is a wandering goddess still bearing the mark of her Asiatic origins [Paglia is referring to supposed Asian origins of mother-goddess cults]. She has "a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic, -- a taste of the gorgeously beautiful," expressed in needlework. The scarlet letter, standing for adultery but also for the Alpha and Omega of divinity, is adorned with "elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread." A Byzantine Madonna or Renaissance queen, Hester exposes the multiple repressions of Puritanism: beauty, sex, imagination, art. [. . . ] Like the veiled minister, Dimmesdale is a man of God who seeks the goddess. His virility is as dim as his name. With his breathless tremors and "childish weakness," the "passive" Dimmesdale is a Romantic male heroine, more son than lover. Even if one accepts the adultery as a given, the sex act has permanently crippled the male, a drone stunned by the queen bee. Hester must exhort Dimmesdale, "Preach! Write! Act!" She has energy because she is Romantic nature, while Puritan patriarchy is in decadent decline.

12. The climax is Dimmesdale's night ascent of the public platform of ritual exposure to stand with Hester and her daughter. As they hold hands, "a tumultuous rush of new life," "a torrent" of "vital warmth" pours through him: "The three formed an electric chain." The minister's acceptance of moral responsibility? - worthless in my view if not in the day. I see the scene as a tableau of matrilineage staged on the pagan altar of archaic night. The male joins himself to the electric chain of femaleness. Rejuvenated by a surge of female force, he declares, in effect, "I too am born of woman!"

13. As in The Minister's Black Veil, a covert transsexualism is at work. In his early twenties, before secluding himself in his mother's house for twelve years, Hawthorne added a w to the family name Hawthorne. This w prefigures the scarlet letter that, in "The Custom-House," he tries to fix to his breast but drops on the floor when he feels it burning with ghostly mana. "Hawthorne" is his father's name blasphemously hermaphroditizied. The w, I thing, is for woman, whom Hawthorne injects into his patrimony, just as he is to restore the mother to the Puritan seventeenth century in The Scarlet Letter. The Romantic idea of a hermaphroditic surname may have come to him from the fact that his mother's maiden name was Manning.

14. [. . .] Criticism fails to notice that major nineteenth-century American literature has as perverse a visual eroticism [see Freud on 'scopophilia'] as anything in Decadent Paris. Hester, warning the palpitating Dimmesdale of Chillingworth's "evil eye," tries to break the spell by "fixing her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power" over him. In Romantic vampirism, ocular fascination accompanies monstrous soul-divisions. One gender may split into a warring pair, autoerotic and self-tormenting. Dimmesdale is tied to Hester by guilt and dependency but not by sexual cathexis. His real lover is Chillingworth, to whom he is locked ins sterile sadomasochistic marriage.

15. The bareness of Puritan plain style and the absence of inherited art works starved the American eye and aggravated the dangerous power of the visual when it arrived via Romanticism. Asceticism, fearing the eye, actually sharpens it. Hawthorne illustrates the sexual problematics of the visual when Hester is brought before the multitude: "The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentred at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne." Hester as a scapegoat is the focus of projected eroticism. The thousand eyes obsessively fixed on the scarlet letter are "concentred at her bosom:" because the mother's flowing breasts have been expelled from Puritan consciousness. There is a mass voyeurism of attraction and repulsion. Let us follow Hawthorne's language into all its strange implications. Hester bears the intolerably "heavy weight" of eyes "fastened upon her." Surreally, the thousand eyes are attached to her bosom, sacs of engorged significance. [. . .] Hester, like Vergils' adultery-spurred Rumor, is spangled with multiple staring eyes. [. . . ]

16. An archetypal reading of The Scarlet Letter removes its Americanism, its sense of place. It also suppresses the plot. But the American elements in the Late Romantic Scarlet Letter are relatively superficial. Prerevolutionary New England is simply "the ancestral" in the shorthand of local dialect. It is no more authentic than the creaky medievalism of a Gothic novel. Plot is always negligible in Romanticism. Plot is history, cause and effect rationally unfolding in time, but in Romantic poetry, history is irrationally propelled backward toward the primeval. The plot proffered by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is false. The same with The Scarlet Letter, which can be read for plot only if one ignores huge emotional and sexual gaps. The Scarlet Letter is an archetypal vision of persecuted woman moving serenely in the magic circle of her sexual nature. Dimmesdale is a son-lover who longs to merge with the mother but cannot. Pearl is the infant son [yes, this is not a misprint] purged of his divisive maleness. Hester clones her in the stress of solitude. Time has ground down the adulteress' stones to sand, around which forms a perfect pearl. For Hawthorne-as-Dimmesdale, the mother is both too near and too far. The Scarlet Letter formalizes Hawthorne's ambivalent adult relation to his mother, who must be thrust into the mental distance for imagination's survival.