"A" Confession: How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father

THOMAS LOEBEL "A" Confession: How to Avoid Speaking the Name of the Father ven had he not named Anne Hutchinson in The Scarlet Letzter , Nathaniel Hawthorne tempts his readers to engage the relation between the Puritan society ofhis narrative and that of history in 1638. In both, a breech of Puritan law is at issue: adultery might suggest to some a "monstrous birth." And the question of public speech figures prominently: Hester Prynne's refusals and Anne Hutchinson's abundant expressions. However, as Michael Colacurcio states, "Clearly . . . the relationship is not one of 'identity': tempting as the view might be made to appear, The Scarlet Letter is probably not to be read as an allegory of New England's Antinomian Crisis" (178). Through detailed archival work, Colacurcio demonstrates convincingly how none of the characters and events in Hawthorne's novel really maps onto those involved in the Antinomian Crisis of 1638. Comparable, however, are Hawthorne's literary figures of Hester Prynne and Anne Hutchinson, found within the textual relations of his larger body of writing. As Colacurcio argues, Hester Prynne passes through a certain kind of antinomianism , "only to emerge as a version of the sexual reformer already 'typed out' in Hawthorne's 'figure' of Mrs. Hutchinson as independent and reforming 'female'" (184). Hawthorne's description of Mrs. Hutchinson in his sketch of the same name involved working out his own commentary on "the woman," a term that refers simultaneously to Anne Hutchinson as female and to woman as a category, both of which were vocally political, seemingly to Hawthorne's dislike in 1849. Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 Thomas Loebel I would like to engage whether the non-allegorical status of The Scarlet Letter in relation to the Antinomian Crisis is so clear, while gesturing to the ways in which literature might "speak" (to) history. In terms of the general relation to history, I use the word "speech" as a figure for how literary language is rendered as both address and potentially redress. In terms of the particular relation between The Scarlet Letter and the Antinomian Controversy, the question is that of the nature, derivation, and performance of speech—speech as a manifestation of language that can articulate private thought into public performance. While the theological issue at stake in the Antinomian Controversy concerns whethet or not Anne Hutchinson accused the Ministers of preaching a Covenant of Works—an accusation that challenges their abilities as Ministers of Puritanism—the political, gender, and linguistic issues that are intertwined with the theocracy open pertinent, additional sites of the Controversy for allegorical rendering. Colacurcio recognizes what, he suggests, Hawthorne recognizes of Mrs. Hutchinson and the Controversy, that "The issue is not sanctification as an a posteriori evidence ofjustification, but the woman's own prophetic abilities" (185), which enables "the woman question" to be the relational bridge between The Scarlet Letter and the historical events, with Hawthorne's "Mrs. Hutchinson" as its stepping stone. Detailing the theological issue (the status of prophecy) as a gendered political issue (the problem of woman as reformer) in this way is to accept the dominant male historiographie terms of the Controversy—those of the Ministers, Winthrop in particular, and then later Cotton Mather's rendition in the Magnalia Christi Americana—and it is arguable whether Hawthorne's narrative in The Scarlet Letter accepts these terms as the ones that it wishes to prioritize . What I wish to explore is how the spirit of The Scarlet Letter is rendered in relation to Anne Hutchinson's own terms, and not those of the Ministers and Magistrates. For while Anne Hutchinson realizes that the theological issue in her case is immediately a gendered political issue of power and influence over others, she argues that it is at root a linguistic issue, a question of her ability to speak the word. ABERRANT SPEECH Ifthe Examination ofMrs. Anne Hutchinson begins with the charge that she "troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches" "A" Confession by speaking "divers things . . . very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and the ministers thereof" (312), the Magistrates amplify the speech and...