Pornographic Manhood and The Scarlet Letter

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

PORNOGRAPHIC MANHOOD AND THE SCARLETLETTER T. Walter Herbert Southwestern University In "The Invention of Pornography" Lynn Hunt describes the genre as a social creation that is defined collaboratively by those who produce it and those who try to stamp it out. Lists of forbidden titles in pre-revolutionary France form a canon, in which erotic books—like Thérèse Philosophe—are mingled together with a general run of works deemed treasonable and seditious : attacks on the ancien regime routinely accused clerics and great lords of sexual depravity, and some titles offered graphic descriptions of their lewd behavior.1 A new form ofillicit sexual writing emerged in the nineteenth century , however, in keeping with the emerging middle-class pre-occupation with the sacredness of the home: censors now denounced pornography not for sedition , but for indecency. Producers of pornography, likewise actuated by impulses that arose from the new cultural arrangement, generated distinctive smut. Rather thanjeering at the vices of decadent aristocrats, the reader of the new pom found himself inveigled into the mingled desire and guilt of sexual aggressors alarmingly like himself.2 The term "pornography" entered the English language in 1850, and was quickly applied to the new mode of sexual writing.3 Twentieth-century definitions , like contemporary instances, often retain qualities first observed in the antebellum period. The standard adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 specifies material that "appeals to a prurient interest," implying an itch that gets worse as it is scratched.4 Reading porn heightens the impulse to read porn, so the definition indicates; and this experience carries forward the quality of guilty and obsessive reader involvement that became characteristic of the genre in the early nineteenth century. The emerging genre of pornography, I argue here, discloses and serves the sexual consternations of an emerging genre of manhood; I then turn to Hawthorne's depiction of pornographic manhood in The Scarlet Letter. George Lippard's Quaker City provides a classic instance of the new porn. Lorrimer and Mary sit on a sofa in the Rose Chamber of Monk Hall, a gothic castle of lust in downtown Philadelphia. The two figures appear to be perfect opposites: Lorrimer is an experienced sexual predator, Mary an innocent maiden. "It was the purpose of this libertine," Lippard remarks, "to dishonor the stainless girl, before he left her presence. Before day break she would be a polluted thing."5 Mary in this scenario is evidently a woman, soon to be raped by a man, namely Lorrimer. Yet "Mary," I propose, is a man in disguise. 114T. Walter Herbert Feminist discussions of pornography—from Susan Brownmiller to Catherine McKinnon—have shown that sexual violence enforces male dominance ; I'm pursuing a complementary line ofinvestigation, looking for sources of sexual violence not only in the relations of men with women, but also in the relations of men with each other, and men with themselves.6 In the feminist consciousness-raising ofthe mid-sixties women sought freedom from ingrained habits of subservience that had come to feel natural and right. Women freed themselves from themselves: they set their personal stories in an historical context and learned to understand spontaneous impulses as the outcome of social arrangements. "The women's movement has drawn inescapable and illuminating connections," wrote Adrienne Rich in 1971,"between our sexual lives and our political institutions."7 Growing boys likewise internalize models of manhood, whose contours present themselves as the shape of reality. Yet we are only beginning to understand the political structures and cultural traditions hidden within masculine experience and to challenge their logic. Fantasies of sexual violence victimize women, as does sexual violence itself; but this fact alone does not explain the grip of such fantasies upon the emotional lives of men, or the tacit permission law-abiding men chronically extend to sexual offenders. Male dominance is active in the sexually violent pornographic script not merely in the abuse of the female figure by the male, but more powerfully in the way these figures are constructed. "Mary"—the canonical female victim in this scene from The Quaker City—is made to embody male experiences . She is a mirror that reflects a male predicament back into male...