Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth

Early in The Scarlet Letter (1850), as Hester Prynne faces public discipline, the narrator halts to comment, "In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France" (55). In a subtle reading of this passage Larry Reynolds notes the anachronistic use of "scaffold"--the normal instruments of punishment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were the whipping post, the stocks, and the pillory--to argue that Nathaniel Hawthorne self-consciously alludes to public beheadings, especially the regicidal revolutions in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France. But none of Hawthorne's many critics has noted the anachronistic use of good citizenship, a phrase that suggests the rich historical layering of Hawthorne's nineteenth-century romance about seventeenth-century New England Puritans.

Of course, citizen existed in English in the seventeenth century, but it was used primarily to designate an inhabitant of a city, as Hawthorne does when he mentions "an aged handicraftsman . . . who had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder, now some thirty years agone" (127). The official political status of residents of Boston in June 1642 was not that of citizens, but subjects of the King, a status suggested when Hester leaves the prison and the Beadle cries, "Make way, good people, make way, in the King's name" (54). Historically resonant itself, this cry reminds us that it was precisely in June 1642 that civil war broke out in England (Ryskamp, Newberry). In fact, the book's action unfolds over the seven years in which the relation between the people and their sovereign was in doubt, the years generally acknowledged as the time when "the Englishman could develop a civic consciousness, an awareness of himself as a political actor in a public realm" (Pocock 335); that is, as a citizen as those in the nineteenth century would have understood the term. ¹ Even so, it was not until after the French and American Revolutions that good citizenship came into common use.

When Hawthorne inserts the nineteenth-century term good citizenship into a seventeenth-century setting he subtly participates in a persistent national myth that sees US citizenship as an outgrowth of citizenship developed in colonial New England. Hawthorne's participation in this myth is important to note because much of his labor is devoted to challenging its standard version. According to the standard version, conditions for democratic citizenship flourished the moment colonists made the journey to the "New World." If the people in the 13 colonies were officially subjects of the king, the seeds of good citizenship were carried across the Atlantic, especially by freedom-loving Pilgrims, who found a more fertile soil for civic participation than in England. A recent example of this version of the story comes in the work of the noted historian Edmund S. Morgan. De-scribing "the first constitution of Massachusetts" in 1630 when the assistants of the Massachusetts Bay Company were "transformed from an executive council to a legislative body," Morgan writes, "the term 'freeman' was transformed from a designation for members of a commercial company, exercising legislative and judicial control over that company and its property, into a designation for the citizens of a state, with the right to vote and hold office. . . . This change presaged the admission to freemanship of a large proportion of settlers, men who could contribute to the joint stock nothing but godliness and good citizenship (Puritan Dilemma 91)." ² When Morgan designates freemen citizens, he projects onto Puritan New England his awareness of political changes still to come just as most studies of colonial American literature project the country's present political boundaries backward and treat only the 13 colonies that eventually became...