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

was a woman. "It was an age in which the human intel-
lect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and
a wider range than for many centuries. Men of the
sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder
than these had overthrown and rearranged--not actually,
but within the sphere of theory, which was their most
real abode--the whole system of ancient prejudice,
wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester
Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom
of speculation, then common enough on the other side
of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers had they
known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than
that stigmatized by the scarlet letter."45
The first generation of settlers, said Hawthorne,
were "in the first stages of joyless deportment, and
the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry....
Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the
early emigrants, were the blackest shade of Puritan,
and so darkened the natural visage with it,that all the
subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up." Like
the Reverend John Cotton, Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale
at first was able to mediate between the grim male soldier-
magistrates on the one side, and what Hawthorne presented
as the antique gentility, the softness, beauty, complex-
ity and fallibility of a maternal woman on the other.
But Prynne's banishment represented the exclusion of all
of those qualities from a place of value in the American
character. Hawthorne described Prynne "banished, and
as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or
communicated with the common nature by other organs and
senses than the rest of human kind." He said the activ-
ity--needlework--which her exclusion from other forms
of expression forced upon Prynne, was characteristic of
women generally in the middle of the nineteenth century,
as well as in the first generation of settlement. "She
had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental charac-
teristic--a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which,
save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found
nothing else in all the possibilities of her life to
exercise itself upon. Women derive pleasure, incom-
prehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of
the needle. To Prynne it might have been a mode of
expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her
life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as a sin."
So Prynne's "other organs and senses" were her female
ones (and their presumed psychological correlatives),
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