The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 19 (2008)

Sex and the City:The Reconstruction of Middle-Class Urban
Consciousness in The Scarlet Letter
Naochika TAKAO*
If there is any message in [Hobson’s] book, it is that the search for an alternative
prostitution policy will be stymied if reduced to technical and legal procedural
strategies. Both short-term remedies and long-term solutions must be tied to general social policies on poverty, nonmarital pregnancy, child support, and women’sinferior economic position. Ultimately prostitution politics must confront masculine and feminine constructions of sexuality.
—Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue (8)DOUBLE DISPLACEMENTS IN “THE CUSTOM HOUSE”
In the latter part of “The Custom-House”—the textual port of entry to seventeenth-century Boston depicted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)—the author conjures up “the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue [his official predecessor]” and receives a command to write a story about Hester
Prynne and her scarlet symbol (147). This little literary conceit concerning
the story’s origin enables Hawthorne to introduce at once two strategic displacements, one topological and one ancestral. First, invoking Surveyor Pue
allows Hawthorne to talk about “a regular history of Salem,” his native town,
when in fact the story of The Scarlet Letter evolves in and around the town ofPuritan Boston. Apparently, Pue spent his time as “a local antiquarian” researching not only in Salem, but also in the provincial capital, and “supplied
Copyright © 2008 Naochika Takao. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be
distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission fromthe author.
*Professor, Chuo University

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material” for both The Scarlet Letter (set in Boston) and “Main Street” (abouta Salem thoroughfare) (145). Hawthorne seems almost anxious to make theconnection between his birthplace and the New England metropolis, as heinserts the fictional surveyor between himself and the source of the story. He
equivocates concerning Hester’s whereabouts when he talks about “her habit . . . to go about the country as a kind of voluntary nurse” (146; italics added). He also avoids mentioning Boston as the story’s backdrop, as if to confound the reader. And he even ascribes the story’s “stern and sombre aspect”
to “the period of hardly accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil[i.e., Salem’s political turmoil after Hawthorne was ousted from the Custom
House Surveyorship],” thus throwing the careless reader off the scent as to
the geographical context of the story (156).
The second displacement involves Surveyor Pue himself. Hawthorne surmises that he “might reasonably regard himself as [Hawthorne’s] official
ancestor” (147). Since Hawthorne discusses his biological ancestors earlier
in “The Custom-House,” imagining their criticisms about his being “[a]writer of story-books” (127), the command from Pue as his “official ancestor” to “bring [Pue’s] mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public”(147) would allow Hawthorne a poetic retaliation, even if in a caricature (asthe archaic word “lucubrations” suggests), upon his Puritan forefathers. The
effect is not just psychological. Hawthorne’s re-creation of his ancestors in
the figure of a local antiquarian must be seen as evidence that he is consciousof the buried history of the Puritan past, and particularly how his biologicalancestors persecuted the religiously unorthodox, including witches. For thesurrogate ancestor’s interest in the past and his command to lay it open
(which Hawthorne seems to follow in “Main Street”) bear out this historicalconscience. Hawthorne takes a penitent posture when he responds, withmock assiduity, “I will!” (mimicking the answer, “I’ll try, Sir!” said to begiven by the Custom House Collector, an aged veteran of the War of 1812).
In this caricature, Hawthorne pokes fun at the obsequious government officials who were involved in his dismissal as the surveyor of the Custom
House. In so doing, he suggests in an ironic way the precariousness of blind
obedience to law (either religious or military).
But the greater question is: What is the meaning of these displacements
performed simultaneously by invoking an official predecessor? Why pull off
these literary conceits simultaneously? Or, to put it more phenomenologically, what sort of horizon of consciousness forms the backdrop of suchdouble erasures of topological and ancestral dominance? Admittedly, Hawthorne is an inveterate practitioner of such literary displacements. More obvi-

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ous cases of geographical and/or chronological displacements are found in
his shorter tales of New England history, as in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” where the political unrest during the revolutionary era is pushed backin time by about 40 years, or in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” where an
eccentric priest is transplanted several miles from where he really was. Compared to these, the displacements found in “The Custom-House” are more
subtle, but for that very reason more complicated and more impregnated withpsychological significance. This essay analyzes the reasons behind Hawthorne’s ancestral/topological displacements as key conceits in The Scarlet
Letter.
In the following sections, I will argue that these displacements are concerned with a nascent urban, middle-class consciousness emerging out of oneof the first cityscapes in the United States. The first of the two axes of these
displacements makes it possible for Hawthorne to historicize the reformatory
tendencies at work in the nineteenth century, while the other axis paves theway for politicizing the seemingly innocuous construction of middle-classurban space. Together, those displacements open up imaginative space forHawthorne to engage in historical criticism of middle-class consciousness. I
will first discuss how a propensity for middle-class “city reading” became
commingled with a strong urban reform disposition in America. I will alsodelineate an antebellum reform crusade that has special relevance to the storyof The Scarlet Letter; namely, the female moral reform movement. Moving
onto the inner workings of the novel, I will then describe how Hawthorne
positions the three main characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, andRoger Chillingworth, in the public sphere of Puritan Boston. The resolutionof the story of the adultery between the minister (Arthur) and his parishioner(Hester), and of their relation with her husband (Roger), I will argue, is deployed as the author’s critical response to the construction of middle-classurban consciousness. Finally, I will return to the preface of the novel andshow how Hawthorne’s experience of being dismissed from public officeconnects to the aforementioned double displacements to create a novelistic
form of social criticism.
MORAL REFORM IN THE CITY
Hawthorne stayed in Boston for a few days in May 1850, and after “carefully read[ing] over” “The Custom-House” (as it caused such a hubbub in“the respectable community around him”), he decided to publish it anyway.
In one of the entries in his notebooks during his stay, he writes, “I take an28

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interest in all the nooks and crannies and every development of cities.” Andcertainly, he takes special interest in “an elderly ragamuffin” in front of a“grog-shop” called Parker’s, located on Court Square near Boston’s old CityHall.
He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some former period of his
life, but, falling into decay (perhaps by dint of too frequent visits at Parker’s bar),
he now haunts about the place, (as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered)to “collect his rents” . . . . The word “ragamuffin,” which I have used above, does
not accurately express the man; because there is a sort of shadow or delusion ofrespectability about him; and a sobriety too, and a kind of decency in his groggy
and red-nosed destitution. (American Notebooks 496)

Reminiscent of Old Moody in The Blithedale Romance, the poor man bears
witness to Hawthorne’s penchant for observing people. Hawthorne is conversant in the emergent art of “city reading,” an art practiced, for example, byCharles Dickens on London and Lydia Maria Child on New York City, as
Wyn Kelley substantiates in her seminal book, Melville’s City (38−59). Whatmakes Hawthorne remarkable, however, is his ability to penetrate the ragtag
of society and to zero in on an individual in an empathic way.1 Compare his
passage with a contemporary deprecation of the city’s vices:Sir, I always enter your city [i.e., Boston] with my mouth open, and I always leave
it with my eyes shut; or, to speak without a metaphor, I always enter it with admiration, and come away with tears. So much outward happiness, and so much real
misery! There are pale cheeks, sunken eyes, and broken hearts! There is the widow, whom despair has driven to intemperance; and there the harlot, whom seduction has rifled of her charms; there is the poor man, who always must be poor; andthere is the disappointed father and the blasted son. (“The Art of Packing” 211)Evidently, the narrator is overwhelmed by “real misery” in the city andcannot but gape helplessly at the scenes around him. To “enter [the city] withmy mouth open” and to “leave it with my eyes shut” sums up nicely the twomodes of encounter with urban space in Kelley’s analysis: “panoramic” and“labyrinthine.” According to Kelley, who develops Leo Marx’s classical“American ideology of space,” Dickens exemplifies the male mode of panoramic spectatorship, which anticipates mastery, and Child the female modeof labyrinthine surrender and escape. But when put in a temporal order, I
contend, these two modes will tell a story of a typical reformer of the age(personified in the anonymous author of the above article), who enters thecity with high hopes of understanding and appreciating human achievement,

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and leaves it with helpless disgust at human vice (either to flee from it or to
tackle it later).
Hawthorne’s approach, on the other hand, might be characterized as “entering the city with eyes open and leaving it with mouth shut”; that is to say,his sympathetic perception of the dissipated conditions of his fellow humanbeings rejects any panoramic mastery of the cityscape or any labyrinthine
dismay over its mob-like crowd, as his objective but insightful account of the“ragamuffin” above reveals. Mastery and escape (and/or surrender), in an
encounter with the city, represent two styles of middle-class reformatory
discourses, in which the city is either judged according to the master narratives of religious and moral persuasion, or repudiated as hopelessly degenerate. Hawthorne would rather map the history of the ragamuffin’s life, which
vibrates sympathetically with the town’s social and economic history, onto
his sketch of the man. By doing so, the author may recognize the reasons
behind this man’s dissipation, and at the same time penetrate the labyrinthinecourse of life he was forced to follow, without condemning him. In a sense,
Hawthorne narrativizes the city in this man’s consciousness, thus bypassing
the reformatory urge one might normally feel when encountering the chaosof urban space. By historicizing the cityscape, so to speak, in the figure of aragamuffin, Hawthorne copes with his encounter with the city in a unique,historical way.
In terms of history, the city of Boston did not have much to narrate then,since it was not even incorporated as a city until 1822. And a mere year after
its birth, the city’s second mayor, Josiah Quincy (the first of that name, later
dubbed the “Great Mayor”) launched a campaign against “the Hill,” the center of vice in the West End of Boston. There “brothels, dance halls, and gambling houses . . . enjoyed a lively business, seven days a week.” Exercising
his mayoral power without reservation, Quincy “appointed a marshal of thecity to oversee the police and public health, [and] supervised a rigorous
streetcleaning campaign” (Kennedy 48, 47). The fact that the belated establishment of a city government in Boston coincided with such a strong reformatory crusade is a good indication of how urban space is constructed bymiddle-class ideology in the United States. From 1822 to 1823, moreover,the city funded the construction of a workhouse (the House of Industry) at
Boston Neck, and later a prison (the House of Correction) near the new courthouse, strengthening its power to discipline those who “refused to live bymiddle-class codes of hard work, chastity, and sobriety” (Hobson 19). The
development of Boston as a model city was thus fraught with middle-classinhibitions about sexuality. “Boston of the town house, park and city place,”

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as Charles “the Great Selectman” Bullfinch envisioned it, “became the ideal”
for the moneyed bourgeoisie (Kennedy 40, 27). And in the process, the city
is literally discovered when people living in it suddenly feel the need to control sexual transgressions committed in their neighborhood.
The City upon a Hill, however, continued its struggle to subdue its unseemly side, seemingly to no avail. In 1820, the estimated number of prostitutes in Boston, both full-time and part-time, was 2,000, which was hardly
less than that in New York.2 And, as a historian sums it up, “[n]either raids
ordered by Mayor Josiah Quincy in 1823 nor a grand jury investigation
launched by Judge Peter Thacher’s municipal court in 1831 nor the new police department’s sweep through the city’s disorderly houses in the early
1840s had more than a temporary effect.” In fact, “the city’s red light district
scarcely changed in the years between 1820 and 1850—except to grow insize” (Pease 150). In one of the Ann Street “descents,” or raids, in 1851, forexample, ninety women were arrested as prostitutes in one night (Lane 65).
A deluge of immigration, especially from famine-devastated Ireland, did not
help improve the situation.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many moral reform societies cropped up
around New England in the 1830s and 1840s. The New York Moral Reform
Society, the brainchild of the notorious John R. McDowall, was formed in
1834; and a year later Boston saw the organization of its own Female Moral
Reform Society. According to Daniel S. Wright, what distinguished the Boston Society from its sister society in New York was that it “never gave up thehope of reclaiming prostitutes” (24). It continued its “rescue missions” longafter New York’s moral reformers had lost faith in the effectiveness of reclamation (i.e., rescuing prostitutes from brothels) and shifted their focus toprevention (instructing children in sexual purity). The Boston group evenboasted in 1841 that it had rescued “twenty-five fallen women” (Wright 25).
Boston’s legacy of combating socially unacceptable behaviors died hard. The
sisters in the Boston Female Moral Reform Society not only held fast to
middle-class domestic ideology, but also believed in enforcing this ideal onto
the city in general, always trying to reclaim their fallen sisters back into the“proper” woman’s sphere.
Ironically, the Boston Female Moral Reform Society enjoyed relative independence from male supervision. Unlike its sister society in New York, it
operated without any major overseeing organization, either clerical or reformatory, which allowed its members a rare autonomy. This, however, exacerbated an ideological contradiction that nags at the base of all female moral
reform societies: they claimed for themselves a public sphere where only

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women can be effective, thus overstepping the bounds of the restrictive ideology of “True Womanhood,” while at the same time they embraced this restrictive ideology in trying to “protect” the woman’s sphere.3 In their encounter with urban space, woman reformers tried to gain mastery over the publicsphere by admitting their susceptibility to the middle-class ideology ofwomen’s (a)sexuality. And by subscribing to the discourse of victimizationin combating sexual immorality, they strengthened the restrictive hold ofgender “difference” that they wished to overcome. Here, a variation of themastery/surrender dichotomy in the urban encounter, which we have discussed above in conjunction with Kelley’s analysis, again becomes apparent.
Storming down on inner-city vices with police force is equivalent to the panoramic style of Dickens, whereas reclaiming fallen women from amidst urban debauchery corresponds to Child’s vertiginous concept of the metropolitan labyrinth. If these two styles of encountering urban space construct
middle-class consciousness in regard to the city, then reformatory impulses
are the stuff of which the city is made.
In one of the recent influential studies on The Scarlet Letter that haveplaced Hawthorne more rigorously into contemporary social contexts, Leland S. Person points to “an Africanist ‘presence’” (quoting Toni Morrison)in Hester’s character (38), and concurs with Jay Grossman, who argued forthe novel’s involvement with “antebellum discourses of miscegenation” (37).
But Hester’s self-ordination as “a Sister of Mercy” (257) figures more as
representing the plight of middle-class female reformers themselves, rather
than those whom these reformers set themselves to save, such as workingclass women and slave women. Her situation might better be understood aslinked to the impasse into which those female reformers were put. Her dailyrounds into “the household that was darkened by trouble” (256), and the lossof some attribute, “the permanence of which had been essential to keep her awoman” (259), are subtle markers of Hester’s social placement as a moral
reformer. And when Hester repeatedly asks “the same dark question . . . withreference to the whole race of womanhood,” wondering if “existence [was]worth accepting, even to the happiest among them” (260), Hawthorne shows
his profound understanding of the troubles that women reformers were facing. The public nature of urban space did not sit well with nineteenth-century
ideas of womanhood. A woman was considered to have “a body that she
could not master on her own” (Isenberg 43), incapacitating her to enter the
public space of rationality and accountability. Female reformers, trying toopen a crack in the male-dominated public sphere, were usually “portrayedderisively as harlots, miscegenationists, or spinsters shamelessly shopping

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for husbands,” as Isenberg summarizes. To be a “public woman” meant bothto speak in “promiscuous audiences” and to be a prostitute. Those white
women consorting with black men and women on stage during public
speeches were condemned as forcing “their prostitution” on the public (46).
A female moral reformer ran the risk of being seen as entering public spacewith her uncontrollable body and prostituting it to the public, thus becoming
herself one of those whom she had stepped out of her sphere to help.
What Person cautiously calls Hester’s “ambiguous racial markings” could
also be seen as marking this double-sided perception of female reformers:i.e., their status of occupying the place of the reformer and the reformed at thesame time. Her independence from society and freedom of speculation, herseeming loss of womanly affection, and her wandering “without a clew in thedark labyrinth of mind” (261), all suggest that she has become someone withcircumstances similar to that of an antebellum prostitute. Hawthorne, we may
conclude, models Hester after the figure of a female reformer, in that both areforced to stand in the position of the very person they are trying to help. The
speculation that Hester dared to pursue “the most boldly,” not unlike Barbara
Hobson’s feminist program quoted above as an epigraph, reveals the agonies
of female reformers of all ages:
As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew.
Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has
become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed toassume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being
obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until sheherself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated.
(260)

Hawthorne’s profound understanding of middle-class ideology is shown in
the final stage of this proposed reformatory revolution. In envisioning theradical subversion of the middle-class self, Hester’s reformatory speculationis shown to be constructed fundamentally on a desire to reform herself. The
reason for the conflation of the reformer and the reformed, as exemplified in
the female moral reform movement, is that, though women reformers might
have been pejoratively labeled by the dominant press as sexually immoral, it
is also the case that, in order to take up a “fair and suitable position” in society, they need to stand in the place of the fallen woman so as to reform themselves.
This is a classic case of middle-class “correction by interiority,” as Richard

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Brodhead has aptly called it (29). Wright’s study reveals an interesting motive behind such self-reformation. According to him, the moral reform movement was strong in those towns where women experienced a radical decreasein the number of children they bore during their lifetime. This shows thatwhen the right to control reproduction shifts into the hands of women, thepsychological corollary is that they then see the need to reform sexual morality. Just as the middle-class discourses of panoramic/labyrinthine encounterswith urban space “discovered” the city in its reformatory impulse, the female
moral reform movement, which was precipitated by such a discovery, resulted from the middle-class desire to discipline itself, against the backdropof the plethora of sexual misbehaviors in the city.
“Let the condemnation of the guilty of our sex remain entire; but let not themost guilty of the two—the deliberate destroyer of female innocence—beafforded even an ‘apron of fig leaves,’ to conceal the blackness of his crimes”(Hill 66), the female reformers cried, demanding accountability from theother sex. By putting a similar discourse into the mouth of Arthur Dimmesdale to milk the name out of Hester, Hawthorne is reiterating the same kindof self-disciplinary proclivity: “What can thy silence do for him, except it
tempt him—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven
hath granted thee an open ignominy . . . . Take heed how thou deniest to
him—who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself—the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!” (175). Here, Hawthorne does more than merely parody the reform movements of the time. He
is historicizing the reformatory discourse that constructed middle-class consciousness in its encounter with urban space. By depicting Hester’s struggles
as both the reformer and the reformed in Puritan Boston, Hawthorne shows
the historical background of this middle-class culture of self-discipline, justas he did in the case of the “ragamuffin” in the streets of Boston.
REVELATION OF A HIDDEN CHARACTER
At the height of her social discipline on the scaffold, Hester’s view is overwhelmed by her memory, which “kept bringing up other scenes than thisroughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness.”
She first remembers her native village in England, where “a decayed house ofgray stone, a poverty-stricken aspect,” her paternal home, stands; then comesthe picture of “the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray houses,
the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city” (167−68), which is apparently Amsterdam.

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Hawthorne thus slides away from a New England colonial hamlet to an Old
England small town and then to a Continental city; in this way, he thematizes
the progressive construction of urban space and places it in this scene of public opprobrium, just as he has done in the novel’s introductory essay. It isnatural for anyone to flee a scene of public shame, if only in imagination, but
the transatlantic displacements Hawthorne employs at this juncture force thereader to visualize the historical development of urban space. The labyrinthine passages in the Continental city, moreover, embody the mechanism of
the repression of metropolitan transgressions through which sexual immorality is hidden from the public eye. In Hester’s imagination, Hawthorne represents several different developmental stages of urban space as the various
aspects of middle-class consciousness that together construct the city space.
The images of the places Hester sees on the scaffold correspond to three
men who, historically, had the power to control a woman’s life: her father, herhusband, and her pastor/lover. Her father’s poverty in the old country indicates, at least partially, the reason why she had to accept a proposal from an
old hermit. The picture of a Continental city is a crystallization of Roger’s
mind, in which his learning—suggested by cathedrals and public edifices, allantiquated and quaint—is intricately convoluted. And the town of Boston, in
contrast, stands in a precarious position between civilization and the wilderness, signifying its closeness to, and its struggles with, the untamed, as indicative of Arthur’s inner strife. These can also be read as illuminating themodes of female encounters with public space. The decay and economic difficulties of the father may illustrate the reasons why women workers cameout to the city, and these in turn figuratively suggest the reasons why immigrants from the old world flocked to the shores of the new world cities. The
intricacies of the Dutch city could represent the dangers—usually sexual—and oppression that women encounter in urban spaces. It also denotes thepsychological maneuvers employed to conceal male desires in urban settings.
The “roughly hewn street” of the colonial town anticipates the hardships andcontradictions women faced in their participation in the construction of
middle-class urbanity in the New World. Without reducing these male characters to allegorical absurdity, Hawthorne is presenting Hester’s life, or, “theentire track along which she had been treading, since her happy infancy”(167), as a series of encounters with different aspects of gendered public
space in western communities, as represented by the men she comes across.
Hester’s decision to stay in Boston instead of “return[ing] to her birthplace, or to any other European land” (186) is therefore a good indication that
the New England town has become symbolic of her lover’s mind. Hovering

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35around the edge of the town, where “[a] clump of scrubby trees . . . did not
so much conceal [her] cottage from view, as seem to denote that here wassome object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed”(187), Hester’s dwelling makes tangible the connection between Arthur’s
suppression of their affair and the town’s oppression of her presence. The
geographical position of the cottage relative to the town (“It stood on the
shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards thewest”) [187], moreover, would have reminded the contemporary reader of thelocation of the notorious West End.4 On top of that, the reference to Hester as“a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of her of Babylon” (212) places her
figuratively in the place of the prostitute in the modern city. Hence the physical layout of the town of Boston re-creates the configuration of Arthur’s
psychological landscape.
The clash between Arthur and Roger may then be read as the story of an
American city struggling with the inner-city vice that it apparently inheritedfrom its European counterpart. In one of the showdowns between the minister and “the leech,” Roger, whose sphere is said to be “in great cities [of Europe]” (221), the latter talks about grave-yard weeds, which, according tohim, “grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret thatwas buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his
lifetime” (231). Roger’s concern, and the measures he would take to rectify
it, are characteristic of urban reformatory discourse. He prescribes a confession “to make manifest an unspoken crime,” because it is what “all the powers of nature call so earnestly for” (231). The physician is saying in essence
that an open community of intelligent beings must be established as the supreme court of rationality presiding over the whole of creation, to receive
confessions and to condemn and/or pardon the confessed wrongdoings. He
promotes the rationality of the bourgeois public sphere, which historically“emerg[ed] from an expanding commercial culture and organiz[ed] itself on
the model of free trade between equal parties” (Henkin 9).5 It is embodied, as
it were, in urban reform movements as part of the Enlightenment project,which endeavored to eradicate metropolitan vice, just as Roger did in dealing
with his patient, Arthur.
With the repressed presence of Hester as the symbol of “fallen women” atthe edge of the town, and with the aggressive reformatory discourse developed by Roger as the guardian of “the health of the good town of Boston”(220), Arthur’s Boston is enticed to move forward in time into the discourseof middle-class urbanity prevalent in Hawthorne’s era. However, Arthur
counters Roger’s discourse of urbanity with an older view of the public

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sphere, in which those who are responsible for the maintenance of the peaceof the flock can selectively conceal facts about society in order to manipulate
it. He argues that the guilty men with “a zeal for God’s glory and man’s welfare” “shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men;because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them” (232). Roger’s
individualistic modernity echoes the penitentiary discourse of the nineteenthcentury prison reform movement: “If they would serve their fellow-men, letthem do it by making manifest the power and reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential self-abasement!” (232). Arthur, in contrast, refuses to make open the innermost vacillations of the human heart. He would
rather acknowledge that something must always be withdrawn from the rational consciousness of the public so that the public sphere may be established.
This acknowledgement opens up a space for the archaeology of the publicsphere by pointing to the power relations that make the public sphere possible. Arthur’s seemingly premodern discourse of the archaeology of the soul,
therefore, conceals Hawthorne’s anti-reformatory awareness of the ideological construction of middle-class urban space.
The embryonic urban consciousness, which Hawthorne hypothesizes in
the figure of Arthur Dimmesdale, is therefore forced to choose between two
tough options: either he must follow the path of the feminist moral reformmovement (as epitomized by Hester) which, often at variance with its own
middle-class inhibition, would eventually lead to a revolutionary overthrowof the pre-existing sexual order; or, he is obliged to develop an urban consciousness that represses sexual desire behind a thin veneer of respectability,
to “create [urban] landscapes of self-representation that could display andlegitimize their [middle- and upper-class] status” (Domosh 156). Towards theend of the story this choice becomes most apparent in the two escape paths
presented by Hester as theirs to follow. “Deeper it goes, and deeper, into thewilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step,” she points to the west, “until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the whiteman’s tread.” And then again, the other option: “there is the broad pathway ofthe sea!” She envisions a life together with Arthur “[i]n our native land,
whether in some remote rural village or in vast London—or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy” (288). Agonized by the presence in his
psyche of what he deems as grave sin, Arthur had no choice but to embark on
a self-disciplinary reform program, but which should it be? The famous“citadel” metaphor—the word etymologically designating urban space—would bespeak the historical junction where a premodern communal consciousness in shards, as represented by “the ruined wall” (291), had to come

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to terms with its new-found middle-class sexuality in one way or another.
The “revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling,” experienced by Arthur after their decision to flee the New World back to “the Old World, with
its crowds and cities” (303), can be summarily understood as the experienceof a premodern community metamorphosing into a modern city, a processthat the industrialized parts of antebellum American society were undergoing.6 A variety of questions he inwardly faces—the meaning of “the communion-supper,” the question concerning “the immortality of the human soul,”
the possibility of sexual temptation and verbal blasphemy, and the existenceof evil in the figure of Satan—are all signs of the premodern religious spherethat previously controlled the civic order. The minister is tempted by the modernity of the public sphere, which would lead first to the nineteenth-century
middle-class self-legitimization in urban space, and eventually to its urban
cleanup campaigns and moral reform movements.
How, then, can the minister resist this temptation, if indeed he does resist
it? Hawthorne develops his own narrative of an alternate history as social
criticism in his work. After returning from the forest, Arthur talks to his now
suspected friend about “the free air which [he has] breathed” (311)—the expression carries an ironic echo of what Arthur formerly felt about Roger’s
presence in his residence, which is described as introducing “a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study” (223). This is ironic because it insinuates that the urban discourse represented by Roger has some similarities
with the female reformatory discourse represented by Hester. The “freedom”
these discourses promise, either from urban vice or from sexual oppression,in fact obscures the regulatory function that middle-class ideologies performed against working-class women and immigrants.
As Roger exclaims, Arthur is “he whose body is the closest conjoined, andimbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument” (235); in other words, his psychosomatic connection can expand to thecommunity he pastors. When he preaches the election sermon his voice
therefore generates a sympathetic vibration in the audience, just when “a new
man is beginning to rule over them,” as Hester darkly remarks (316). Arthur’srole as delegate from God sanctioning the powers that be, and his sympathy
with the audience (his election sermon unites the whole community in expectancy of “a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the
Lord” [332−33]), set up the psychosomatic condition that places him as a
figure of premodern society on the verge of establishing urban space, assailed
by the tides of modernization. Arthur’s answer to them is to expose the stigma of the letter A on his chest. He shows, that is, a sign of his suffering

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through the years after his adulterous intercourse with Hester—beneath theminister’s voice was “the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived, ofsuffering humanity” (328). Arthur stands in front of the public, not as a reformer (one who covers social evils with deeds), but as someone who has
physical traits to be interpreted, someone who has his own history to be divined in spite of its opacity.
The undeterminable nature of the symbol in itself calls for an act of decipherment. This opacity is exactly what the symbol on Arthur’s chest siginifies: it points to the existence of an untold history, which is the fact of an incipient defeat on the part of the men who seduce women; it testifies, that is tosay, to what middle-class urban consciousness represses in order to establish
itself. The urban self-legitimization by the middle class through the construction of the public sphere in the city conceals behind it the susceptibility on thepart of man to “irrational” female influences; female reform discourse masks
the self-disciplinary drive that is instigated by man’s sense of failure to control his sexuality. Arthur’s symbol shows the profound critique in which
Hawthorne engages to offset these urban discourses prevalent at the time. His
final moral—“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not yourworst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” (341)—thoughseemingly out of place in the story of an adulterous relationship, is in fact
very appropriate: the story teaches the existence of a “history” behind what
seems historically constant, like a seemingly pre-existing gender alignment
or urban vice. By delving into the background of the reformatory enthusiasm
and urban cleanup campaign, Hawthorne is saying, one can at least find thepossibility of establishing better psychohistorical accountability in the public
spaces of America.
OUT OF CITY SPACE THROUGH THE CUSTOM HOUSE
After Hawthorne was ousted from public office at the Salem Custom Office in June 1849, he wrote a public letter in response to a Whig editorial,
which was most likely written by Charles Upham—Hawthorne’s politicalarchenemy in Salem. This former minister was responsible (or at least so
believed the Hawthornes) for his removal from the lucrative position. Charging the author of the editorial, Hawthorne says “the slanders of private animosity and the distorting medium of party prejudice may have deceived him”
(Letters 282). His detailed response to the accusations is obviously meant tobring forward the private and prejudiced nature of the accusations leveled athim. According to Stephen Nissenbaum, Zachary Taylor’s promise in 1848 toSEX AND THE CITY

39

retain eligible Democratic appointees was a campaign tactic attacking theJacksonian spoils system. It was in essence a reactionary policy to control
further inroads of “the radical party,” as Edward Everett called the Democrats, into the American political system (Nissenbaum 65). The firing ofHawthorne, apparently contradicting this policy, in fact revealed how theWhigs aimed at controlling city politics. Upham had to remove Hawthorne toprotect party emolument out of the Custom House Office, so as to secure hispolitical ambitions. Upham’s reformatory zeal, as evidenced by his antislavery activities, represented exactly the type of middle-class Whig smugnessthat Hawthorne attacked in the figures of his Puritan ancestors. Hawthorne’s
antipathy to such political machinations can be recognized in his later caricature of Upham as Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables. Throughthe character of Pyncheon, Hawthorne demonstrates that Puritan self-righteousness may hide many personal axes to grind. During this period of political tumult, therefore, Hawthorne experienced a public humiliation notunlike what Arthur Dimmesdale undergoes. And through that experience, hediscovered the bourgeois ideology at work organizing urban space in America. The experience confirmed his understanding of the “social mechanismsthat individuate members of society and also discipline them,” as Hoffman
summarizes (203).
The minister’s struggle with his base sexuality therefore marks the shapeof the political pressure under which Hawthorne was put. He locates the disciplinary impulses, found both in Hester (representing the female reformers)
and in Roger (as the figure of urban moral control), in terms of middle-classreformatory social control. And he situates Arthur as divided between the
struggle to control his own sexuality and the civil policing imposed fromoutside. Arthur’s self-revelatory tactics, namely, his confession of sin and therevelation of the letter A on his breast as a case of interiorized moral correction, in the end question the legitimacy of such middle-class reform programs
and radically criticize the ideological groundlessness of their morality. By
initiating a historical re-examination of social discipline in the psychologicaltravails of Arthur Dimmesdale, Hawthorne establishes a critical archaeologyof middle-class consciousness.
The replacement of his native town with the New England metropole on
the one hand, and of his local ancestors with someone who came from thatcity on the other, as discussed in the first part of this essay, indicate Hawthorne’s awareness of the precariousness not only of urban political life, butalso of the urban public sphere in America. The displacement of Salem with
the Puritan town suggests that the social control exercised in a Puritan theoc-

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racy (as exemplified by the town of Boston in The Scarlet Letter) is hardly
superseded by the ideological policing in the contemporary city (as experienced by Hawthorne in Salem’s political commotion). The displacement of
his Puritan ancestors with Surveyor Pue, however, indicates Hawthorne’s
acknowledgement that such social control can only be laid bare by historically narrativizing its genesis and development. In such a historicized narrative, his Salem ancestor’s involvement with the witchcraft trials is shown as
an instance of the ultimate form of social control.
In this context, the character of Arthur Dimmesdale embodies the double
displacements Hawthorne pulls off in “The Custom-House.” Arthur’s divided
position between Hester and Roger connects the political embarrassment
Hawthorne experienced in Salem and the urban reformatory discourse prevalent in Boston; his confession at the end typifies the historical narration ofwhat lies behind the middle-class desire to discipline. By sliding away fromhis own personal experience of public humiliation in Salem to the larger
problem of social discipline as exemplified by the various reform movements
in Boston, Hawthorne discovers a necessary locus from which to talk about
the engendering of middle-class disciplinary consciousness. The double displacements therefore enable Hawthorne to open up the “neutral ground” (asHawthorne privileges the space of his historical romance) where Arthur’s
struggles with the figures of the female reform movement and of urban disciplinary control may be viewed in a historical perspective.
NOTES
1Dana Brandt’s classic analysis of the nineteenth-century American authors (including
Hawthorne), from which Kelley departs, applies Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “flaneur” totheir city romances. According to Brandt, the function of the flaneur is “to assure a literatebourgeois audience that urban crowds were not as illegible as they appeared to be, that social
life was not as incoherent as it appeared to be, and that the masses were not as politicallythreatening as they appeared to be” (6). It must be noted, however, that Hawthorne’s “reading”
of the ragamuffin emphasizes the city’s unpredictable nature, both economic and social, andtherefore functions to aggravate anxiety about urban space, rather than to reassure a bourgeois
audience. What must be remembered is that American authors were aware of the strong reformatory atmosphere present in their society.
2
Marilynn Wood Hill, using William Sanger’s extensive study published in 1858, calculates the number of prostitutes in New York in 1830 to be 2,127, and that in 1850 to be 5,413(32). Pease estimates the number of prostitutes in Boston in 1820 to be around 2,000 (150).
3
Though the Boston Female Moral Reform Society was one of the first stages from which
Angelina Grimké declared that “this reform [of women’s rights] was to begin in ourselves,”
spearheading the radical feminist movement, the constituents of Moral Reform Societies
around New England were composed predominantly of the wives of conservative artisans, according to a meticulous study by Daniel S. Wright. He concludes that “by providing a counter-

SEX AND THE CITY

41

balance, the ideology of female character and of gendered spheres, however expanded bymoral reformers, served to enable market participation by middle class women and men”(147).
4
Hobson marks the location of “the Hill” district (West End) on the map of Boston in the
mid-century, which is on the shore of the Charles River basin, facing westward across thewater toward the town of Cambridgeport (Hobson 77). Hawthorne worked at the Boston Custom House from 1839 to 1840, and knew the city inside out.
5
David M. Henkin argues, perhaps correctly, that in America (and probably in other partsof the world, too) the public sphere was not destroyed with the coming of consumer culture
during the nineteenth century (as Jürgen Habermas contends), but was rather reinforced to
become “a broader-based, more boisterous, and more populous public centered in the streets”(Henkin 13) by the act of what he calls “city reading.”
6
Larry J. Reynolds has already shown that the “revolutionary form” that the relationshipbetween Hester and Arthur assumes evidences the anxiety caused by European revolutions.
My argument takes the idea of revolution as more social than political, in the context of theurban development of America.

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