Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude toward Women Author(s ...

women to total dependence on god-men left women more
exposed to the pure willfulness of God, or, conversely,
women's relationship to God was undiluted by the self-
serving legalisms of covenant theology.
This assertion of godlike, manly and independent
willfulness by way of dependence on womanly passivity
was compressed into a perverse but not unfamiliar meta-
phor during Hutchinson's trial. The accused asked
what law her adherents had transgressed. Winthrop
replied, "the fifth Commandment, which commands us
to honour Father and Mother, which includes all in
authority, but these seditious practises of theirs,
have case reproach and dishonour upon the Fathers
of the Commonwealth." There were no Mothers of the
Commonwealth. Men designed and controlled the union
with Christ. It was only logical, then, that they
should see their role vis-a-vis the community as com-
parable to breast feeding. Winthrop's court addressed
the Hutchinsonians in this way: "We beseech you con-
sider, how you should stand in relation to us, as
nursing Fathers."40 The notion reminds one of Hawthorne's
vision of the iron-breasted Puritans in "Endicott and
the Red Cross." Such nursing, together with Winthrop's
and Cotton's copulation with Christ, had been anti-
cipated by Luther's characterization of preaching
as "suckling" and his awaiting Christ "sicut mulier
in conceptu"--like a woman at the moment of concep-
tion.41 The images recall Bruno Bettelheim's descrip-
tion of men's attempt to assume the processes of gen-
eration and nurture in preliterate tribal life.42
The preceding hypothesis coincides at several
points with Hawthorne's view of Puritan history as
he presented it in The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne
was, of course, a self-conscious descendant of the
Puritans, and quite expressly a student of Puritan
history. He repeatedly directed the reader's atten-
tion to the similarities between the heroine of The
Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, and Anne Hutchinson.
Next to the door of Prynne's prison, "the black flower
of civilized society,' was a wild rosebush that Haw-
thorne said might well have "sprung up under the
sainted footsteps of Anne Hutchinson, as she entered
the prison door." Hawthorne represents Hester Prynne,
too, as "saintlike," and if Hutchinson's theological
heterodoxy was held to have led to sexual offenses,
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