The Dark Labyrinth of Mind: Hawthorne, Hester, and the Ironies of Racial Mothering

THE DARK LABYRINTH OF MIND: HAWTHORNE, HESTER, AND THE IRONIES OF RACIAL MOTHERING Leland S. Person University of Cincinnati If a pastor has offspring by a woman not his wife, the church dismiss him, if she is a white woman; but if she is colored, it does not hinder his continuing to be their good shepherd. —Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl "Explicit or implicit, the Africanist presence informs in compelling and inescapable ways the texture of American literature," argues Toni Morrison. "It is a dark and abiding presence, there for the literary imagination as both a visible and an invisible mediating force. Even, and especially, when American texts are not 'about' Africanist presences or characters or narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation."1 In this essay I want to accept the challenge Morrison issues to American literary scholars and to explore the "dark labyrinth of mind," as Hawthorne calls it, that constitutes Hester Prynne's subjectivity and subject position in The Scarlet Letter.1 With some uncanny inspiration from the epigraph I have taken from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl,3 1 want to examine Hester within a historical context formed by the intersection of motherhood and race and to ask some questions about how discourses of motherhood, slavery, miscegenation, abolition, women's rights, child custody, and so on contend with one another at the site ofHester's character. Hawthorne referred to the importation of slaves as a "monstrous birth," and in this essay I wish to see how and what Hester's maternal behavior signifies within a racial context of "other," if not monstrous, mothering.4 Hester Prynne's adulterous behavior and the scarlet letter that initially represents it also deform her motherhood. Examined within a nineteenth-century context, moreover, Hester's deviant mothering can be understood more particularly within a framework of slave motherhood. SociologistPatricia Hill Collins, for example, describes a "distinctly Afrocentric ideology of motherhood " that slave women adapted to the oppressive conditions of slavery: community-based childcare, informal adoption, reliance on "othermothers"— traditions, she emphasizes, rooted in very different life experiences from the prevalent cult of true womanhood, with its dependency on a world of separate male and female spheres.5 Hazel Carby points out, in this respect, that Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl contradicts and transforms an ideology of true womanhood and motherhood "that could not take account of 34Leland S. Person her experience."6 Linda Brent abandons her children in order to save them— convinced that they have better chances of survival and success with "others ." In Carby's view, "Jacobs developed an alternative set of definitions of womanhood and motherhood in the text which remained in tension with the cult oftrue womanhood."7 Deborah Gray White, furthermore, documents cases from the 1830s and 1840s of slave mothers who actually killed their children. Some "claimed to have done so because of their intense concern for their offspring." One mother claimed that "her master was the father of the child, and that her mistress knew it and treated it so cruelly that she had to kill it to save it from further suffering."8 Whether or not a mother actually commits infanticide, as Cassy does in Uncle Tom's Cabin or as the slave mother does in Frances Harper' s poem of that title, slavery radically altered motherhood— inverting or ironizing it.9 "I made up my mind," Stowe's Cassy explains. "I would never again let a child live to grow up! I took the little fellow in my arms, when he was two weeks old, and kissed him, and cried over him; and then I gave him laudanum, and held him close to my bosom, while he slept to death."10 Converting the maternal breast into a source of poison rather than nourishment—being a good mother in the deforming context of slavery can actually mean killing, not nurturing, one's child. Killing the child to save it, giving it up to ensure it a better life: both forms of ironic mothering suggest a perverse inversion—what Jean Wyatt, referring...