"A curious subject of observation and inquiry": Homoeroticism, the body, and authorship in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Derrick, Scott S

In the nineteenth century, an aggressive and scientifically-minded health establishment, involving both the emerging profession of medicine and a much broader cadre of social commentators, discovered the contemporary discourse of health as a rich and apparently inexhaustible source of social authority. On the one hand, this discourse testified to the power of the masculine mind to assert its authority over the gendered body and its processes; on the other, this authority was (and still is) continually challenged and disrupted by an array of bodily experiences that refuse to be reduced to scientific sense.

In this particular version of the war between mind and body, ongoing since the latter emerges in nineteenth-century popular culture as an "object of knowledge," sexuality has, as Michel Foucault argues, occupied a crucial position and marked the front lines of battle. It is characteristic of sexuality as a key term in the disciplining of the modern subject that one cannot identify with anything like precision what one understands it to mean even as it evokes the materiality of the body and its pleasures. No term remains shiftier in contemporary critical discourse. It stands indeterminately for an unboundable collection of desires, acts, pains, pleasures, and fantasies that resists reduction to objective sense. It constitutes the shifting frontier of knowledge, both enabling and disruptive, toward which the science of self perpetually advances.(1)

This contest between two versions of the body--as subject of rational inquiry and as the site of resistance to reason--informs the representation of homosexuality in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a text which, as a consequence, becomes an important document for an understanding of the emergence of sexual identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.(2)

My analysis of the staging of homosexual identity in The Scarlet Letter breaks into three sections. First, I briefly note those passages in The Scarlet Letter that suggest the importance of homoerotic dynamics to the text--and argue that these same passages also foreground the body as an epistemological problem.(3)

Second, I develop a context for such dynamics in terms of nineteenth-century culture using Sylvester Graham's A Lecture to Young Men, a book which conducts a rigorous examination of the tremulous relations between rational mind and erotic body and serves as a useful nineteenth-century framework for understanding the threat eroticism--and especially homoeroticism--poses to Dimmesdale's psychic economy and to the narrative economy of the novel. Finally, I argue that the linked textual "problems" of homosexuality and bodily epistemology must be seen in terms of this narrative economy. The representations of both are mediated in The Scarlet Letter by a master-narrative of Hawthorne's own achievement of authorship in the face of the difficult circumstances of his life, a master-narrative that redirects attention from sexuality back to gender. Developing in complex tandem with the novel's more famous and equally troubled marriage plot, this master-narrative produces both the possibilities and limitations for understanding the many bodily "mysteries" represented in the novel.

I.

Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter contains much that we, as contemporary readers, would recognize as the machinery of homophobia, and, of course, of the homoeroticism homophobic structures both admit and work to suppress. The Scarlet Letter contains the kind of erotic triangle that, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued, can function as a disguise of, and a conduit for, desire between men. Both Chillingworth and Dimmesdale have relations with Hester Prynne, the former as the cuckolded husband, the latter as her adulterous lover. Throughout the novel, however, we rarely see either male having contact with Prynne; instead, they take up residence with each other.

The categories of "homosexuality" and "homophobia" are, needless to say, problematic ones to invoke in terms of United States culture before the Civil War. I use them here because their figuration in The Scarlet Letter is so uncannily and proleptically appropriate to the formalization of such categories at century's end. In general I agree with Michael Warner's recent comment, made in terms of Walden, that "historians may have given too much credit to the power of merely lexical changes. The genealogy of the modern vocabulary of hetero-homosexuality can be seen already in Thoreau's framing of the problem" (55).(4)

No one would deny that terminologies and categories have immense power to produce and change what they purport to describe, but we may have sacrificed too much of the sense that diagnostic terminologies reflect the empirical efforts of their authors to describe behaviors and cultural formations, for good and ill, already in existence. As I believe The Scarlet Letter helps to show, both homosexuality and homophobia have clear prehistories in which their later forms are already strikingly evident. I intend this turn-of-the-century lexicon here, nevertheless, to be understood with an implicit parenthetical "pre" attached, a prefix which, however awkward, preserves he question of historical difference as an open and difficult one.

The intimacy between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale described above functions without significant problems as long as both men keep to the stable homosocial plane of recognizable professional and intellectual matters.

There was n fascination for the minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he recognized an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or scope; ... that he would have vainly looked for among the members of his own profession....

A

kind of intimacy ... grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human thought and study, to meet upon. (123-25)

This intimacy, however, generates for Dimmesdale a set of anxieties directly and obsessively related to Chillingworth's body and his own as interpretive problems. Despite Dimmesdale's own "strong animal nature" (130),

he looked doubtfully, fearfully,--even, at times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred,--at the deformed figure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait, his grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's sight; a token, implicitly to be relied on, of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was affecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause. (140)

Conventionally, of course, the unnamed "morbid spot" could be taken to signify Dimmesdale's guilt at his unconfessed adultery with Hester Prynne and his paternal responsibility for Pearl; but the passage also contains ample evidence of homophobic hysteria. Such a reading is supported by an ensuing scene that David Leverenz characterizes in terms of rape.(5) In it, we are told that Chillingworth penetrated his patient's innermost chambers, "laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment that, hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional eye." His look at the sleeping Dimmesdale produces a

wild look of wonder, joy, and horror] With what a ghastly rapture ... 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.... But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was the trait of wonder in it] (138)

The physician's "ghastly rapture" and "ecstasy" which follow his disrobing of the minister suggest that what has occurred is some sort of erotically charged, physical violation. It is far from clear, however, how Chillingworth's violation of the sleeping Dimmesdale should be understood, particularly since all interpretations have implications that are politically difficult and pertain, directly, to the relation of homophobia and desire.(6)

The potentially homophobic reading of this scene as rape rests in part on the biographical speculation of James R. Mellow that Hawthorne was molested as a youth by his uncle, Robert Manning.(7) This may or may not have happened, but as an argument it exists in a circular relation to passages such as this in Hawthorne's fiction. The reason to read this scene as, literally, rape, in other words, is the possibility of a rape in Hawthorne's past life; the reason to posit such a rape of Hawthorne, at the same time, is that his fiction contains such passages. With a slight adjustment of vision, we might just as easily argue that Dimmesdale's unconsciousness in the scene represents a desire to have some sort of erotic contact with the older man and yet to escape any responsibility for enacting such a prohibited desire. This reading, in turn, if what Hawthorne represents is a metonymy for rape, arguably masks a sexual violation as the desire of the victim. The apparent split, meanwhile, between a reading of the scene as one of a phobic depiction of violent molestation and a reading of the scene as containing covert positive desire encourages a simplified either/or relation to the problem of homophobia in The Scarlet Letter. Lacking Walt Whitman's sublimated language of comradeship, in other words, and several psychic light years from Whitman's expansive desire to tear the doors of guilt from their jambs, much of Hawthorne's access to the homoerotic was through a culturally available language of prohibition metonymically linked, as we shall see in the next section, to masturbation phobia. At the same time, since The Scarlet Letter is finally a fantasy produced by Hawthorne, the homophobia of the text works to suppress or repress something it itself is producing. Its homophobia, in other words, must be more than simple negation.

If the reader faces an interpretive conundrum at this point in the text, it is a conundrum in which Hawthorne's narrative enthusiastically joins by positing the body as a complex interpretive problem with no solutions. What does Chillingworth see that generates "wonder" even in his own scientific psyche? If he has discovered the first traces of Dimmesdale's own emerging "A," the letter in no way clarifies the mystery of its appearance on the minister's breast. Instead, it sends Chillingworth into an orgasmic physical joy that presents his own body as an interpretive problem. How are we to understand his extravagant ecstasy, which stands in direct contrast to the "profound depth" of Dimmesdale's own "remarkable" (138) repose? Between the activity of the former and the lassitude of the latter, Hawthorne positions Dimmesdale's usual sleep habits, but only through a metaphor that coyly defamiliarizes even this normal activity as a natural mystery: "he was one of those persons whose sleep, ordinarily, is as light, as fitful, and as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig" (138).

Even when awake, Dimmesdale's bodily actions and their motives are finally opaque both to himself and o the scrutinizing reader. Shortly before Chillingworth succeeds in physically examining his breast, the minister has suddenly "rushed out of the room" (137) to escape from Chillingworth's invasive questions. Dimmesdale, we are told, "was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate. He marveled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back the kind old man" (137).

Chillingworth reads this "outbreak" as proof of the minister's capacity for passionate adulterous sin, but offers no help in reading the nature of such passion, except to pose it in opposition to coherent selfhood: "But 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). The mark of such passion is its capacity to problematize identity by rupturing the borders of the body. The minister "hurrieth out of himself" even as Chillingworth's own ecstasy "bursts forth" from his "figure" several pages later. At the same time the nature of this passion--and whether it should be understood in heterosexual, homosexual, or some other set of terms--remains ambiguous: "as with one passion, so with another." All erotic passion in The Scarlet Letter threatens the bodily integrity and rational self-control of is possessor.

II.

The scenes I have just discussed present the male body, which until recently has generally been treated as a cultural default, as a profound intellectual and emotional problem. Much of this same anxiety about the body and its potential doings can be found beneath the surface of the nineteenth-century advice book, except that the palliative of the advice book was always the same: the regulative rationality of bourgeois life. This rational normalcy was precariously propped against a gothic sense of the costs of transgression of middle class standards--sinners in the hands of an angry doctor. Even moderate writers on men's health regarded the body's capacity for passionate excess as a threat to rational masculinity. Dangerous activities included masturbation or excessive masturbation; non-procreative sexuality outside the containing frame of the family; often excessive sexuality even within marriage; and the related bodily ills imagined to be linked to behavior such as idleness, gambling, and the consumption of alcohol. The key to male health was the mind's capacity to understand and subdue the body.(8)

One of the most interesting and important nineteenth-century accounts of the unsettling relation of the body to identity, and the most useful for understanding The Scarlet Letter, occurs in health reformer Sylvester Graham's well-known A Lecture to Young Men, published in 1834 in Providence, Rhode Island. Reason collapses as a successful arbiter of the relation between mind and body in Graham's text, and this collapse results from the rigor with which Graham considers the interrelations between the two. Roughly Hawthorne's contemporary, Graham provides a remarkably accurate nineteenth-century reading of the symptomology of Dimmesdale as a victim of sexual sickness.(9) Graham shares Hawthorne's profound sense, in other words, of calamitous consequences for reason of an erotic free-fall into the body.

To Graham, the danger of sexuality consists in the capacity of body and mind to corrupt each other. Left to itself, the prelapsarian body would be governed by an instinct that would regulate sexuality according to reproductive need. The condition of modern culture is such, however, that natural controls no longer function. Among all the animals, only "proud, rational man" could destroy the "law of instinct" through the cultivation of a surplus eroticism (15).

It is by abusing his organs, and depraving his instinctive appetites, through the devices of his rational powers, that the body of man, has become a living volcano of unclean propensities and passions. (14)

For Graham, then, it is the alienation of reason from the body that constitutes the body as a living volcano of a problem; but however fallen our condition, reason can also save us: we are also fortunately "endowed with rational powers to ascertain those constitutional laws, and moral powers to prevent that excess" (14).

The danger of such excess, to Graham, is less the loss of semen, the retention of which most nineteenth-century health authorities agreed was crucial for male health, than the "peculiar excitement of the nervous system" produced by the male orgasm (23). This orgasm generates such "powerful agitation" that "The brain,... heart, lungs, liver, skin--and other organs--feel it sweeping over them, with the tremendous violence of a tornado" (20). The natural body, in other words, might first be corrupted by the mind, but the body could then corrupt the mind in turn by virtue of the disruptive power of sexual excitement. Sexuality can be exclusively understood neither at the level of the body nor the mind; it works indefatigably to corrupt the rationality entrusted with its control.

Masturbation for Graham poses a special threat because it engages the mind in a mutually corrupting, indeterminate relation to the body that compromises its independent, regulatory function:

The mental action, and the power of the imagination on the genital organs ... are exceedingly intense and injurious; and consequently the reciprocal influences between the brain and genital organs become extremely powerful, and irresistible and destructive. (40)

In other words, the masturbator and sexual profligate in general would come to have a "diseased association of the cerebral and genital organs" (63). Graham in effect predicts that in the case of the sexual profligate, like Dimmesdale, we will find, in Chillingworth's phrase, a "strange sympathy between body and mind," as each feeds the passions of the other (138).

Significantly, Graham seems quite conscious of sexual relations between men as a dangerous and disruptive form of sexual activity. As Carol Smith-Rosenberg reports, a number of nineteenth-century health writers suggest that masturbation might lead to homosexual activity and attribute to the masturbator the effeminacy associated with the figure of the "homosexual" later in the century (226). Graham is quite firm concerning the risk of male-to-male transmission of masturbatory technique, which frequently is "communicated from one boy to another; and sometimes a single boy will corrupt many others." Graham claims to "have known boys ... at the age of twelve and thirteen, almost entirely ruined ... and many of them went to the still more loathsome and criminal extent of an unnatural commerce with each other]" (42-43).

The violator of Graham's standards of sexual propriety risks a free fall into paranoia and guilt.

Beginning with occasional dejection of spirits, he goes on in his transgression, till ... a deeper gloom ... gathers in permanent darkness over his soul.... If he endeavors to give his thoughts to the most solemn and sacred subjects, still he is haunted with images of lewdness.... Filled with self contempt. He has no relish for the ordinary amusements and pleasures of life.... He is continually tormented with indefinite anxiety and fear]--and is constantly full of disquietude, anguish, and dread] (58-61)

Such an account serves as an apt description of Dimmesdale's guilt-ridden psychic state.

Graham's text indicates the extent to which homophobia in the nineteenth century must be understood as part of a broader erotiphobia, which differentially applies at times to almost all forms of sexual activity. The anxiety in heterosexual masculine culture concerning same-sex desire cannot be understood against a background of untroubled "normal" heterosexuality.(10) Indeed, in Graham's work, though heterosexuality, masturbation, and homosexuality exist as separate categories, the borders of these categories always seem blurred and all three seem to contribute to the same set of consequences. The differences among categories in this hierarchy of horror arguably derives from the success of the well-known male tactic of displacing the anxieties of heterosexuality onto the female body. In masturbation, on the other hand, the dangers of eroticism to a privileged rationality must be confronted by the subject as part of himself rather than as a particular kind of danger in his environment. In homosexuality, dangerous eroticism must be experienced at least as internal to masculinity in part because no bar of morphological difference separates the heterosexual and homosexual man.(11) In addition, even the anxieties of heterosexuality have generated massive and complex defenses against the threat of sexuality to dominant paradigms of male rationality. The loci of such defenses are precisely he heterosexual and heterosexualizing narratives of western culture, which imply--by metonymically sliding from the heterosexual to the heterosocial, or from the problem of eroticism to the problem of male-female relations--that sexuality can be narrativized into sense. I will return to the question of the interrelation between heterosexuality and narrative in The Scarlet Letter in my final section.(12)

Graham serves as a valuable model for the demonic Chillingworth. Though wearing the mask of benevolence and speaking as a confidante, Graham violates the privacy of the young men he studies even as Chillingworth invades Dimmesdale's chamber, authorizing a broad cultural surveillance of their habits and behavior and tortuously demonizing sexual pleasure. Both Graham and Chillingworth embody the hysteria occasioned by the breakdown of abstract reason before what cannot, by its very nature, be made reasonable. What reason denies ends by pervading it in demonized, obsessive form. Chillingworth begins the study of Dimmesdale "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, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself" (129). Beginning with the assumption that his problem is somehow bodiless, the physician falls victim to a passion Hawthorne describes in powerfully physical and anal erotic terms.

He now, dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like n miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. (129)

In homoerotic terms, in ironic contrast to the most obvious import of his name, Chillingworth serves as a figure of excess passion, one whose avidity causes him to violate the privacy of Dimmesdale's person and whose appearance suggests the disintegrative force of eroticism upon masculine identity. When Chillingworth first appears Hawthorne describes him in the following terms:

By the Indian's side ... stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume. He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which, as yet, could hardly be termed aged.... Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the peculiarity, i was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne, that one of this man's shoulders rose higher than the other. (60)

Though Hawthorne initially suggests that Chillingworth suffers from an erotic absence caused by his excessive absorption in mental life, one page later it becomes clear that his threat is, in fact, a phallic one, associated as much with sexuality and the body as with the mind. We are told that "his look became keen and penetrative. 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" (61). 8y the end of the narrative, Chillingworth's enterprise becomes completely demonized. Hawthorne tells us that "there came a glare of red light out of his eyes; as if the old man's soul were on fire, and kept on smouldering duskily within his breast, until, by some casual puff of passion, it was blown into a momentary flame" (169). Hawthorne's remarkably mobile imagery--from head to breast, from fire to dusky "smouldering," and, at a "casual puff of passion," back to a flame--suggests the disintegrative force of passion upon Chillingworth's person.(13)

If we take the disarray of Chillingworth's clothing for a sign of the disruptive presence of homosexuality, if we regard Chillingworth, much like Claggart in the later Billy Budd, as the (pre)homosexual figure in the text, then the "chill" in the text would seem to belong less to Chillingworth than to the phobic Dimmesdale, flying in panic back to the masculinity-confirming environs of the nuclear family.(14) Such a flight may give an additional layer of ironic significance to Chillingworth's remark, at the final scaffold scene where Arthur affirms his- nuclear family ties: "Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,' said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, 'there was no place so secret,--no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,--save on this very scaffold" (253).

Though, again, in a conventional reading Dimmesdale needs to confess in order to save himself from Chillingworth's sadistic manipulation of his guilt, in a homoerotic context it is difficult not to see Dimmesdale's appearance as a way of sanctioning his official heterosexuality, however painful, in a sphere from which his older friend has been excluded. Chillingworth's error has been to attempt to generate this sphere in the absence of conventional heterosexual desires. As he says to Hester:

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one] It seemed not so wild a dream,--old as I was ... --that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide ... might yet be mine. (74)

The consequence of this effort, in homophobically loaded language, is her "false and unnatural relation with (his) decay" (75). Thereafter, he surfaces as her rival in the narrative for Dimmesdale's affections, providing domestic comforts for Dimmesdale in what Hawthorne describes as a substitute for matrimony:

After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, ... the two were lodged in the same house.... There was much joy throughout the town, when this greatly desirable object was attained. It was held to be the best possible measure for the young clergyman's welfare: unless ... he had selected some one of the many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. (125)

Any small comfort provided by this arrangement vanishes for Dimmesdale when he perceives Chillingworth's invasive designs upon his person, which may after all be read as a projection and demonization of Dimmesdale's own desires, desires with which he is unable to cope.

III

Thus far, I have been discussing The Scarlet Letter as if it provided unmediated access to the problems of homoeroticism and homophobia in pre-Civil War culture, as if it might be read as a window on history without any attention to its specificity as a fictional narrative. In fact, I will argue, its representation of both hetero- and homosexuality are shaped in crucial ways by the nature of the novel or romance, and by what it means for a novelist or romancer to write one.(15) Indeed, such questions of writing and authorship and their relation to issues of gender have been at the heart of any number of The Scarlet Letter's most powerful contemporary readings.(16)

At the time of the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne was desperate for authorial success. Prior to its publication his literary career, in his own terms, had been something less than an unqualified success. Hawthorne never regarded his tales and sketches as an especially noteworthy achievement; indeed, even after the long years of seclusion and effort, Hawthorne's income from his writings was scarcely sufficient to support his wife and children. Something of his humiliation at his lack of success is evident in the following letter, written in 1850 shortly before his novel's publication. Its recipient is G.S. Hillard, a friend who had provided financial help:

It is sweet to be remembered and cared for by one's friends.... And it is bitter, nevertheless, to need their support. It is something else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The fault of a failure is attributable--in a great degree, at least--to the man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it behooves me not to shun ifs point or edge in taking it home to my own heart. Nobody has a right to live in this world, unless he be strong and able, and applies his ability to good purpose. ("Hillard" 309)

A combination of such serious financial needs and political opportunities had accounted for Hawthorne's assumption of the post of Chief Surveyor of the Salem Custom-House, a period memorialized in The Scarlet Letter's famous introduction. Hawthorne's tenure in Salem's Custom-House, however, serves, if anything, to intensify his conflicts. As the text states, he feels marginal and unrecognized as a writer in this commercial world: "It is a good lesson ... for a man who had dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to ... find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves ..." (26-27). If working in the Custom-House was bad, getting removed as chief surveyor was surely worse, and, when coupled with the emotionally devastating death of his mother, it seems if anything an understatement that Hawthorne should remark in his introduction that The Scarlet Letter was written in "still seething turmoil" (43). In composing The Scarlet Letter, then, Hawthorne was under immense pressure to complete not only a substantial but a successful narrative, and judging from the letter to Hillard, his masculine identity was at stake in the attempt.

Such pressure implicitly resides in most substantial and committed acts of masculine authorship. Only by producing something that the culture recognizes as a successfully concluded narrative can the title "author" be claimed. The capture of such a title, needless to say, serves as a crucial motive of most acts of writing and arguably for particular authors at particular times the most important motive. For male writers of the American Renaissance, even beyond questions of mere authorship, the question of potential "genius" had come into play, perhaps to differentiate the seriousness of male cultural efforts from the vocational "scribbling" of their popular competitors.(17) Here, for example, is Poe's account of Hawthorne in "The Literati of New York":

For example, Mr. Hawthorne, the author of "Twice-Told Tales," is scarcely recognized by the press or by the public.... Now my own opinion of him is, that ... he evinces extraordinary genius, having no rival either in America or elsewhere. (1119)

Poe himself, of course, would be described by James Russell Lowell as three-fifths genius and two-fifths fudge. By mid-century, the notion of genius was commonly bandied about among writers of high ambition, and represented a raising of the stakes, already high, accruing to any individual act of authorship.

Though one might be moved to write by the perception of a particularly compelling subject near at hand or even be motivated by perceived injustices or other political passions, commonly a desire to be or become an author precedes and motivates the choice of a subject, a hierarchy evident in the perpetual listing of tentative topics in Hawthorne's notebooks.(18) The writer perpetually searches for topics that might lend themselves to particular kinds of literary production. If the desire for authorship does precede the writing project, and if authorship is only achieved upon completion of the enormously difficult task of writing, we might expect that this desire will often, though not always, underwrite the narrative conceived to enact it as a kind of textual unconscious. The existence of such a structuring shadow narrative, a narrative of the writing of narrative, becomes proportionally more likely to the extent that an author works under the added burden of the material and psychological conditions that pressured Hawthorne.

For such a writer, the interval of composition is one of crisis, in which the question of one's identity is momentarily open, in which signs and relations shuffle themselves, in which something lost may surface or in which something new threatens to enter the realm of the Symbolic. The writer might well deliberately cultivate such a crisis through the decision to write, as a way of enacting his/her aggression against a series of identities permitted by his/her culture, identities which, utterly impossible and life-denying, miss some mark that writing strives to define. Such a motive arguably belongs to Hawthorne in the composition of The Scarlet Letter, since his introduction plainly indicates his unhappiness with the commercial world of the Custom-House and the styles of masculinity it promoted.

The nature and structure of narrative production aimed at authorship, then, affects the depiction of sexuality in The Scarlet Letter in crucial ways. Generally, the narrative Hawthorne uses to begin and complete his text foregrounds the well-known heterosexual tale of Hester and Arthur. It is in terms of this relation, primarily, that Hawthorne works out the relation of gender and authorship in The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne describes masculine creativity as a process that springs, like the scarlet "A" itself, from feminine creativity. Dimmesdale, as the character who embodies the problem of male authorship in the narrative, eventually appropriates this passion vis a vis the letter he borrows in the forest and sublimates into the passionate prophecy of the Election Day Sermon, patriarchal prophecy Hester is conveniently unable to hear. This process is an important one and might be given a much more complex description, but it is not one on which I can concentrate in the space of this essay.

Attached to the narrative of Prynne and Dimmesdale are two representations of actual writing contingent to the first and last of the novel's structuring scaffold scenes. The first of these scenes, in "The Custom-House," is explicitly one of feminine domesticity, and represents the kind of place and circumstances in which Hawthorne, no longer disabled by the masculine world of commerce, will eventually compose his text. Lit by "glimmering coal fire" and "moonlight," the empty apartment contains

the chairs, with each ifs separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the bookcase; the picture on the wall;--all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized ... that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change.... A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse.... Thus ... the Poor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land. 35-36)

To Hawthorne, "at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances" (36). In point of fact Hawthorne describes himself as unable to write while connected to the Custom-House, the period of his life that the sketch addresses. The confident, slightly smug tone of his introduction, then, represents the security of already having a substantial part of the manuscript completed, rather than the "seething turmoil" of its conception.

The final scene of writing in the novel, written in the sheltering "refuge" of Dimmesdale's familiar study, records his composition of his Election Day Sermon. This is not a scene of feminine domesticity, but a scene in which feminine inspiration, supplied by Prynne in the forest, yields the masculinizing text with which the novel closes. Dimmesdale writes he night away "as if it were a winged steed, and he careering on it." He only wonders that heaven should have chosen for its oracle "so foul an organ-pipe as he" (225). If Dimmesdale at this point is clearly feeling his oats after safely transcending his renegade temptations (suggestively corresponding to the outlaw adolescent phase of nineteenth-century "boy-life"), his act of authorship also chiefly serves the heterosexual drama of the book. It enables the final scaffold scene, in which Dimmesdale shakes the shadow of the loathsome Chillingworth and achieves his final reconciliation with Prynne and Pearl. If this reconciliation falls somewhat ambiguously between true love achieved and true love thwarted, its ending still corresponds to recognizable paradigms of the heterosexual marriage plot.

Hawthorne's second scene of writing, however, near the middle of his narrative, renders writing in a significantly more threatening and phantasmatic fashion, connected to the body, sexuality, and homoeroticism. This scene corresponds as well to the threatening openness of mid-composition.

Hawthorne's title of this chapter, "The Interior of a Heart," locates its discussion inside the body, and yet because of the metaphorical implications of "heart," also collapses any easy distinction between mind and body, a collapse evident in Dimmesdale's masochistic practice of flailing himself with a "bloody scourge" and "laughing bitterly at himself the while" (144). This self-torture, in turn, produces torturing visions:

It was his custom, too, as it has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast.... He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness; sometimes with a glimmering lamp; and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it.... In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him.... Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes ... now n group of shining angels.... Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother, turning her face away as she passed by. Ghost of a mother,--thinnest fantasy of n mother--methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son] And now, through the chamber ... glided Hester Prynne, leading along little Pearl....

None of these visions ever quite deluded him....

H

e could discern ... that they were not solid ... like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square, leathern-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. (144-45)

Unlike the successful, slightly superior writer of romances in "The Custom-House," noting an ideal set of conditions that facilitate writing, Dimmesdale seems to be systematically decomposing as a subject, a decomposition most graphically marked by the physical extremity of his fasting, his self-flagellation, and the "bloody scourge." In "The Custom-House," Hawthorne posited a relation to a scene of domesticity which allowed the author access to certain gendered cultural commodities, allowed for their comfortable exteriorization, and redeemed the transactions through the author's sense of his beneficent productivity. Here, Dimmesdale's psyche lacks any stabilizing relation to exteriority; calamitous projection so constitutes his world that the sufferer requires an "act of will" to even latch onto the stabilizing but nonproductive presence of "yonder table of carved oak" (145). This table itself suggests the stabilizing comfort of everyday experience, in which the problematic aspects of bodily existence are effaced by the conveniences which surround them, and in which Dimmesdale, free from the agony of self-flagellation, can regard his physical self as a table. Such a table has no capacity to contain the kind of destabilizing memories which afflict Dimmesdale's vigils, and its "carved" aspect suggests a socially sanctioned and safely distanced displacement of Dimmesdale's violent carving of his own body. The Bible serves a similar function, its ineffable spiritual content grounded by its massive "brazen-clasped" presence. Dimmesdale's own emaciated body cannot so stabilize his tortured soul, since each equally conspires in the production of his hallucinogenic visions and engages in the kind of mutual disruption Graham predicts in the passages cited earlier.

This chapter, of course, immediately follows the scene in which Chillingworth violates the minister's person in order, we imagine, to see traces of the emerging "A." It immediately precedes the chapter in which Dimmesdale, for no reason identified in the narrative, abruptly leaves his study for a midnight vigil, joined eventually by Hester and Pearl in a foreshadowing of the heterosexual tableau which ends the novel. This heterosexual tableau comprises, of course, one of the romance's three scaffold scenes, which together stand in stark contrast to Dimmesdale's decomposition evident in the preceding chapter. Indeed, Hawthorne's structuring device always suggests Hawthorne, as author, standing triumphant over his completed creation, as if his text had never existed in any half-completed state, and as if he had never engaged in the struggles of writing that state implies.

This sequence of four chapters in the middle of the text, taken together, suggests a surfacing of the homoerotic exactly at the moment of the novel's greatest disruption of its own intelligibility. Dimmesdale's breakdown, replete with angels, parents, demons, and Hester and Pearl, seems essentially unreadable, as if language and Dimmesdale's psyche have been here stretched to a breaking point. The two preceding chapters, "The Leech" and "The Leech and His Patient," detail the nature of the domestic intimacy between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, ending with Dimmesdale's violation. The energies liberated in Dimmesdale's masturbatory study, in turn, are immediately recontained by the novel's return to its heterosexual plot and its congruent insistence on its own containing narrative structure.

The text's homoerotic energies, then, have been liberated in the context of a scene which stages writing as progressive decomposition. This decomposition represents the liberatory openness of mid-composition, allied to a Barthesian sense of a "text of bliss" as opposed to the settled narrative of a "text of pleasure":

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field ... enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). (Barthes 14)

Such a pleasure is constituted by the shattering of the repressive force of systems of cultural and literary meaning in the service of what those systems necessarily exclude, though the nature of the excluded may not itself be known or knowable. At the same time, seeking such bliss interferes with the progress of a conventional linear narrative toward closure, the text of pleasure which is the cornerstone of the nineteenth-century tradition of the novel.

Something like this narrative pattern is characteristic of a host of nineteenth-century American fictions. In such fiction, somewhere in mid-narrative, one confronts something like a moment of homoerotic exploration or temptation. Just as the difficulty of the body as an object of knowledge in the nineteenth century perpetually threatens a masculinity dependent on rational self-knowledge, the homoerotic surfaces in the midst of conventional narratives that constitute stable and knowable social experience and grant access to social power.

Indeed, what narrative alternatives can easily be in Hawthorne's text besides a return to the heterosexual plot? With the exception of the sublimations of tales of male adventure, what easily appropriable homosexual plots exist in nineteenth-century American literature?(19) What, in the pre-Civil War culture of the United States, might Hawthorne add to this masochistic account of psychic disintegration? The extremity of the passage indicates not only that the text's homoerotic investments threaten the necessary movement of its narrative, but that Hawthorne's creatively necessary access to feminine passion may be threatened as well. The "thinnest fantasy" of the "ghost" of a mother "turning her face away," a triple denial of imaginative access to the maternal, may indicate not only the disabling consequences of Dimmesdale's betrayal of Prynne, but also of those practices which immediately precede this fantasy of maternal disapproval. Though Prynne is a less aversive presence in the fantasy than Dimmesdale's mother, the rebellious passion that defines her value in The Scarlet Letter has been withheld from Dimmesdale to this point in the narrative, while he shares a domestic arrangement with Chillingworth. Reconnecting Dimmesdale to this passion will be the chief task of the second half of the text, a task which also allows for the text's completion.

At the same time, moments of homoerotic temptation, especially any moments as powerfully present as this one, may always be said to alter forever the heterosexual narrative that follows in their wake, just as any textual moment that appeals to the attention of a watchful reader can serve as a crux of a new interpretation. Foreclosed moments of homoerotic explorations reveal, if noticed, the pressure compulsory heterosexuality exerts on the process of composition--and on authors--in nineteenth-century masculine literature.

Neither do the homoerotic energies and desires represented in the middle of The Scarlet Letter simply dissipate when the heterosexual drama of the novel reassumes center stage. Though I believe Hawthorne's narrative might properly be described as a homophobic one, the nature and content of such homophobia, the question of the relation of production to suppression, is extremely complex. Though Chillingworth is made to disappear physically from the text, "vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun" (260), Hawthorne still holds out a hope that he and the minister might also be reconciled and reunited (see Berlant 120).

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, 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 leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same.... 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. (260-61)

In heaven, perhaps, the physician who had "dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave" (129) will join the tortured Dimmesdale in mutually satisfying, if non-physical, affection.

1 This resistance of bodily experience to rational regulation involves and is reflected in the absence of an adequate vocabulary for bodily sensations of pleasure and pain, as Scarry has argued. (3-11).

2 For an alternative treatment of the relation of the body and law in The Scarlet Letter, see Berlant, who argues that adultery in the novel forces men to face "that within themselves which is 'outside' or in excess of the law that founds their authority and self-identity" (117) and that "Dimmesdale's self-combustion can be traced to his need to not know that he has a body ..." (121).

3 The importance of homoerotic dynamics to Hawthorne's text has been recognizpd in varying ways and to varying extents recently by a number of critics. See, for example, Leverenz, Newfield, and Martin.

4 See also Creech's careful identification of this problem in his Clow Writing/Gay Reading: "Even as we wisely caution against naive projection by a contemporary critic, we find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that there were, in nineteenth-century America, what we today can only call homosexuals" (68).

5 According to Leverenz, "his intrusive, sadistic rape first awakens protracted throbs of pain, then culminates in the 'moment of his ecstasy,' when his discovery of what lies on the sleeping minister's chest sends Dimmesdale into a 'shudder' and Chillingworth into a 'ghastly rapture' of riotous gestures" (272).

6 I owe much of my sense of the complexity of this scene to the comments of Chuck Jackson, a gifted graduate student at Rice University, who pointed out, in class, the difficulties of seeing Chillingworth's violation of Dimmesdale as metaphorical rape.

7 Mellow makes this argument in a speculative footnote (610-11). His position is cautiously seconded as a suggestive one by Leverenz: "the threat of homosexual rape seems much more central to Hawthorne's narrative tensions than does homosexual desire" (245). Ehrlich, on the other hand, feels the suggestion of actual violation is excessive given Robert Manning's reputation for "probity and self-discipline": if Hawthorne had been assaulted, she argues, his rebellion against his uncle would have been "more retributive" and "less connicted" (118).

8 According to D'Emilio and Freedman, "Despite extremists ... most health reformers and medical writers who supported male continence did not reject sexual pleasure completely. Rather, they attempted to train men to exert self-control and channel their desires toward procreative, marital relations (69)

9 Herbert has recently argued that Hawthorne's sexual relations with Sophia were marked by nineteenth-century theories about sexualities potentially debilitating effects. These theories suggested that Hawthorne's notoriously feminine personality and his love of solitude might have origins in sexual deviance (Herbert 140-42). Nissenbaum notes as well that intriguing parallels exist between Graham's work and some of Hawthorne's characters, including Dimmesdale (154n3).

Though Nissenbaum offers no poof that Hawthorne was directly influenced by Graham, he does indicate how his cultural presence in Boston was then quite familiar, as when Emerson referred to him as "the prophet of bran bread and pumpkins" (3), and notes also that Graham was "mobbed" twice in Boston during the winter of 1837, and that a boarding house there for the American Physiological Society, which Graham helped to found, was devoted to Graham's principles (115). Throughout his life, Hawthorne had an interest in such Utopian communities, as his personal sojurn at Brook Farm and The Blithedale Romance clearly indicate.

10 It is important to remember that in Graham's text and in most ninetepnth-century advice manuals for young men all sexuality pops a threat. Herbert puts the matter this way: the ideal of self-sovereign middle-class manhood produced an autophobic sexuality, such that erotic arousal was chronically attended by dread and was experienced as disgust and guilt when it was felt to stray beyond the boundaries of self-control" (143).

11 Let me be clear that I am not, however, arguing that homosexuality has a privileged relation to narcissism; rather, I am arguing that homosexuality disrupts the narcissism of male homosocial mirroring.

12 Paul Morrison argues that narrative ltself is heterosexual and heterosexualizing. I would also like to thank him for his generous and invaluble reading of this essay.

13 In fact, Chillingworth, as a (pre)homosexual in the text, suggestively embodies the signifying disarray that Yingling has argued becomes characeristic of modern homosexuality. To Yingling, homosexuality always has an evocative relation to modernism and postmodernism precisely because the homosexual finds himself vertiginously suspended outside conventional codes of gender and sexuality (72).

14 Sedgwick, in her reading of Billy Budd, simply names Claggart as the "homospxual in the text." Her apparently arbitrary insistence marks an inevitable problem of a gay critical practice, given the secrecy which often has necessarily attended gay writing. Claggart must be taken a gay; his homosexuality cannot be proven regardless of the suggestiveness of the text. At the same time, a critical assumption of a chalades heterosexuality may finally be equally ungrounded--just less self-conscious. See Epistemology 92.

15 I am not using the vexed and complicated distinction between "novel" and "romance" in any formal way in this argument. To engage in that argument would not aid this one,

16 That the "A" stands for art, and that Hester in some sense stands variously for the artist, for authorship, for the problem of art, has often been argued. See, for example, Porte 333; Baym, Shape 131, 146; Irwin 333 Person 124-25; and Martin 122-23.

17 Baym suggests that questions of "genius" are gender specific: "

W

here genius was wholly praised in men, in women it was a controversial possesion. In the antebellum era only three women authors were discussed in American magazines as though they were eligible to be thought of as examples of genius: George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Bronte. In each instance the writing about them was troubled" (Novels 259).

18 See, for example, Hawthorne, American 227-28; 236-44.

19 For an account of the male adventure plot and homosexuality, see Boone 225-77.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1975.

Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.

----. The Shape of Hawthorne's Career. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976.

Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Boone, Joseph Allen. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and The Form of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Creech, James. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville's Pierre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper, 1988.

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----. The Scarlet Letter. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962. Vol. of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. William Charvat and Roy Harvey Pearce, gen. eds. 20 vols. 1963-88.

----. "To G.S. Hillard, Boston," The Letters. Eds. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1985. 309-10. Vol. 16 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. William Charvat and Roy Harvey Pearce, gen. eds. 20 vols. 1963-88.

Herbert, T. Walter. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of a Middle-Class Family. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Irwin, John T. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.

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Martin, Robert. "Hester Prynne, C'est Moi." Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. Eds. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Routledge, 1990. 122-39.

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Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, Oxford UP, 1985.

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----. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

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