hic Mulier:

17th century gender trouble & the origins of the american self

Jul 30, 2024

The Sir Thomas Overbury murder case that figures in The Scarlet Letter was the seventeenth-century English scandal. Challenging gender, culture, and politics, Frances Howard’s and Ann Turner’s fashions appeared to manifest fundamental changes in human attitudes and identities which appeared, as Michael Winship shows (”Godly Republicanism”), to be occurring in Jacobean society.1

When political culture confuses family and political institution, so that “talk of the king as father or husband is commonplace, and where the very idea of order, social and political, is conceived in the gendered language of patriarchy,” Alastair Bellany notes, “the connection between gender and politics seems obvious” (20). “Only by taking gender seriously as a category of political analysis,” argues Bellany, “can we decode the political meanings of scandalous representations of female sexuality and male impotence, of female propensities to witchcraft and luxury, of the disordered relations between husbands and wives, or of the betrayal of male friendship” (20). These representations betray the even more scandalous attempt to impose and normalize print control of Patronage political and religious institutions.

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The hic mulier, the man-woman, named the gender-fluidity Puritan critics (including William Prynne in the 1630s) perceived to have made Frances Howard’s fashions and activism noxious during the Overbury Scandal.2 In The Scarlet Letter Mistress Hibbins’s hic mulier displays ground how Hester Prynne’s design and activism instead of her own display challenge gender, political, and religious norms. Mistress Hibbins and Hester Prynne both challenge Standing Order control, but only Hester Prynne’s designs and actions change Patronage discourse schemes for dominance and social control.

Overbury references link Hester Prynne’s and Mistress Hibbins’s contrasting Patronage relationships to Governor Bellingham. Hibbins requires her brother’s protection to continue play-acting as hic mulier witch. Hester’s designs and talent enable her to leverage her Patron-client relationship with him. That leverage continues a transformation that subtly changes gender-roles, political expression, and religious experience in late seventeenth-century Boston.

That subtle change, Hawthorne imagines, enables the democratic shout, “that mighty swell of many voices, blended into one great voice by the uiversal impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many” which, until Arthur’s valediction, had “Never, from the soil of New England” occurred (1, 250). Hawthorne hints in the main narrative about this development of a democratic identity, presumably recounted in the stories that Jonathan Pue heard told about Hester in the 1720s. The conditions which make them possible begin when Hester Prynne ‘wins’ every encounter she has with the Puritan magistracy in the public events of The Scarlet Letter.

An afterthought for much of the novel, Hibbins, “this yellow-starched and velveted old hag” causes Dimmesdale’s breakdown (1, 222). Seeing her, triggers Arthur into framing his love for Hester in terms of the Overbury scandal. Echoing reports of “the infectious poison of that sin” from events which probably occurred before Dimmesdale was born, this passage’s precise thought-report is not a narrative assessment (1, 222). Reporting that Arthur “had yielded himself with deliberate choice, to what he knew was deadly sin” (1, 222), the narrative focuses on Dimmesdale’s choice and how what would become Standing Order Puritanism controlled his knowing.

The narrator could not have seen “the famous yellow starch, of which Ann Turner, her especial friend had taught her the secret, before this last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder” (1, 221). Nor could he have experienced even the second-hand notoriety of the Overbury scandal. The Overbury scandal, and the reports of it, set a template of using discursive terrorism, as John Wilson does in his “discourse against sin” (1, 68), to try to shape communal attitudes towards women. This context determines how Arthur converts Hester’s influence on him into a moral action. Similarly, Roger Prynne’s lengthy foreign exile also becomes understandable not in terms of his (non-existent) religious commitments, but in his association with people implicated in the Overbury Scandal.

Alfred S. Reid argued that Hawthorne based the entire plot of The Scarlet Letter on the Overbury Scandal.4 Hampered by a limited understanding of Hawthorne’s narrative technique, Reid could not follow the complicated linkage Hawthorne suggests between seventeenth-century England’s most notorious political, cultural, and gender crisis and the ending of the Standing Order and the emergence of public women in nineteenth-century Victorian culture. Yet, when Roger Prynne presumes upon his “intimacy” to examine Arthur’s “strange sympathy between soul and body” (1, 137, 138), when he “laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional eye” (1, 138), the narrative genders the interaction in terms of the hic mulier.

Mistress Hibbins, whom Hawthorne associates with key people in the Overbury Scandal, offers herself as a counter-spectacle to the Election Day ceremonies, but Hester’s power draws Hibbins to speak to Hester about Dimmesdale: however misunderstood by the actors in the events and by subsequent generations of readers who have ignored Hester’s embroidery, Hawthorne’s narrative perspective reveals that, as at her first public appearance in “The Marketplace,” Hester’s embroidery establishes the “electric chain” which drives events at this transformative event.5

Bellany notes that “[p]eople obeyed their political superiors in early modern England to a great extent because they had been culturally conditioned to believe they ought to” (22). Rituals which exploited techniques and artistry to suggest that fantasy and imagination must be controlled within “intangible ancestral laws” drove much of this conditioning (Lipovetsky 24). Fascinated by how these power plays shaped an individual’s experience of socially-coded emotions like shame or guilt, Hawthorne writes about Puritan attempts to change these processes through their rejection of vestments and liturgical display. In the process he contradicts scholars of Puritan culture ranging from Perry Miller to Harry S. Stout by showing that these attempts to manipulate individual experience through the discursive control of social emotions failed to achieve their goals.

Because Massachusetts Bay Puritans still responded to this articulation of "rituals, performances, artworks," and fashion, as means of producing and reinforcing "myths about the origins and nature of royal power" (Bellany 22), their print-centered Patronage discourses had a blind-spot or back-door. The Overbury Scandal destabilized the assertion of “myths about the origin and nature of royal power” throughout the seventeenth-century (Bellany 22). In tracing the energy sustaining culture in Boston to Hester Prynne’s art and activism, Hawthorne derives his plot by taking the worst fears of the hic mulier panic seriously and twisting it. Hawthorne destabilizes the myth of divine providence and locates the force of cultural change precisely where Stubbs and the other Puritan critics placed it: in powers of fashion design most closely associated with women.

"[A]bout the time he was writing [The Scarlet Letter],” writes Reid, “he was using The Loseley Manuscripts and an edition of The Harleian Miscellany_," and other works related to the Overbury scandal (Reid 112-113). Amongst the texts included in Kempe’s Loseley Manuscripts is a notice of “An Inventory of the Goods and Evidences of the Earl of Somerset” (407). Included are texts, “enumerated letters patents in a box,” which created “Sir Robert Carre to be Viscount Rochester, Baron of Brancepeth, and Earl of Somerset” (407), a list of properties (“about sixty in all)” (407), furniture and an immense quantity of embroidered and wrought furnishings and portraits. The enumerated tapestry of “the woman taken in adultery” suggests the ironically-placed biblical tapestries which tormented Arthur in his chambers (408; 1, 126). The two paragraphs which detail “the items of apparel, his Parliament robes of scarlet; his robes for an Earl, of velvet; his robes of St. George, as a Knight of the Garter; doublets and hose, of cloth of gold, laced all over with black satin lace, of tawny velvet, embroidered with gold and bugles” and so on (409) anticipate the multiple paragraphs in “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter highlighting the textiles made by Hester which manifested majesty in Boston.6

Mistress Hibbins parades through The Scarlet Letter as a hic mulier. Her adherence to scandalous fashions contrasts their pretended witchery to what Hester Prynne’s work achieves.7 Hibbins figures in encounters with Arthur and Hester in the concluding chapters. Imagining that witchcraft gives her insight, her clothing and conversation triggers Dimmesdale’s guilt as he walks back to Boston in the aptly-titled “The Minister in a Maze (1, 221). Before the Election Ceremonies she presumes to approach Hester and “begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter, in public” (1, 240-241).

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Ironically, Hibbins’s most consequential spell will turn out to be the breakdown her example facilitates in Arthur. Her public conversation with Hester demonstrates that “kindly as so many now felt towards [Hester]” (1, 241), public “dread” of Hibbins causes “a general movement from that part of the marketplace in which the two women stood” without leading to accusations of witchery against Hester (1, 241). The “great magnificence” with which Mistress Hibbins has arrayed herself, in “a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, and a gold-headed cane” embodies the features of the gender-conjuring hic mulier (1, 241).

Once the distinguishing fashion of Lady Somerset, on Mistress Hibbins it suggests that she imagines a greater involvement in the events than merely seeing the procession. In the conversation about what she presumes to be the diabolic source of Arthur’s apparently inexplicable transformation with Hester, Hibbins asks the right question—“Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that encountered thee on the forest path!” (1, 241)—but, guided by her perversion of the main premises of Puritan discourse, she presumes that the answer must involve a transcendental, if diabolical, experience.

Her fanciful tales, which lead Hester to think her of “infirm mind” (1, 241) show Hibbins “aping repressive forms” (Baym, Shape, 161). She incorporates Reverend Mr. Wilson’s initial act of rhetorical terrorism as she claims Hester as one of the diabolical community: “I know thee Hester, for I behold the token. We may all see it in the sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark” (1, 242). Dramatic irony undercuts both of her claims; Hibbins’s certainty that she “knows the world” allows Hawthorne to mark Puritan Patronage discourse’s delusional linkage of fashion and witchcraft (1, 241).

Unaware, like everyone else in Boston except possibly Pearl and Roger, that the energy generated by his renewed commitment to Hester induces Arthur’s inexplicable transformation, Mistress Hibbins applies her inverted Puritan transcendentalism and concludes that his “airing in the forest” implies a diabolical communion with “the Evil One” (1, 241, 242). Hibbins does not, as Nina Baym argues, have a “disturbed, perverse creativity” (Shape 161): she is a copy-cat. Like Lady Eleanore and the men and women who stare at the elaborate figures their embroidered garments make for them in the mirrors of the Province-House ballroom, Hibbins takes pride in someone else’s invention because she thinks of it as a transfiguring medium that communicates transcendent forces for her benefit. Despite her transgressive exterior, and the public fear that shrinks away from “the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds” (1, 241), her imagination remains shaped by Standing Order discourse.

Despite Hester’s repudiation of Hibbins’s charges and fear of her insanity, Hibbins’s claim that “the Black Man . . . hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be disclosed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world” certainly seems to be verified by events, although not in the way that she proclaims (1, 242). Arthur, of course, is the black man and he disorders events: his Patronage-influenced conscience shatters after Mistress Hibbins makes him see his meeting with Hester as irredeemably sinful.

Though “[t]he minister’s own will, and Hester’s will, and the fate that grew between them” (1, 217) generates the feelings which he perceives as “a total change of dynasty and moral code, in his interior kingdom” (1, 217), Arthur has not experienced and reflected upon seven years of transformative events. His identity exists completely in his role of “professional teacher of the truth” (1, 153). Even were Dimmesdale strong, learning that your physician is also your lover’s husband would be difficult to accept with equanimity. Infected by the “enervating magic of place” and whatever methods Roger has been using on him (1, 38), “the revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling” that occur during the meeting with Hester destroys Reverend Dimmesdale and there’s no chance for an Arthur to develop (1, 217).

Hester Prynne’s artistry and “newly emancipated . . . human intellect” (1, 164), however, produce practical and theoretical results, “which our forefathers, had they known of it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter” (1, 164). Jones and Stallybrass note that even “modern analysts of “fashion” have found it hard to think through the contradictory implications of the term” (2):

Focusing upon “fashion” as the transformation of clothing styles, they have seen it above all as a dazzling play of surfaces. In doing so, they have repeated, even if to critique, the antithesis between clothes as the surface/outside and the person as the inside/depth. That antithesis is certainly not a new one. Indeed, it is embedded in classical theories of rhetoric in which the logic of the argument was its “body” and the figures of speech its “ornament” or “clothing.” But this opposing of clothes and person was always in tension with the social practices through which the body politic was composed varied acts of investiture. For it was investiture, the Putting On of Clothes, that quite literally constituted a person as a monarch or a freeman of a guild or a household servant. Investiture was, in other words, the means by which a person was given a form, a shape, a social a “depth.” (2).

Alastair Bellany and Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass emphasize that discourses about the scandals which beset the Stuart kings, of which Overbury was the most notorious, constructed fashion as textuality’s demonic other, capable of amplifying desires, confusing gender-identifications, and corrupting politics. “[T]he underground literature of the [1620s],” writes Bellany, “is crammed with allegations of sexual transgressions, violations of the gender and social order, witchcraft, poisoning, and the betrayal of true martial honour, all with clear political implications and all connected, implicitly and explicitly, to the threat of popery” (254).

William Prynne and other Puritan controversialists wanted political and clerical reform to protect men made by the Word from the temptations and corruptions of fashion. Control of the word and discourse were understood to be masculine faculties. Fashion’s material production of personal and cultural identity (and its highlighting of the masculine beauty prized by King James I) seemed to make upstarts as Robert Carr. It threatened Patriarchal control because it ceded symbolic power to women, in particular, to Frances Howard, Mistress Hibbins’s “especial friend” (1, 221), who would catalyze Carr’s downfall and epitomize the hic mulier of Puritan fulminations.

Michael Sparke and other accusers traced the entire sequence of scandals involving Essex, Somerset, Overbury, and King James to Mrs. Turner’s invention of “that horrid garb,” the yellow ruff and cuffs” (Materials 77). Thus, “[f]or Sparke, Mrs. Turner’s very means of bewitchment were her techniques as a dressmaker and a fashion innovator. Making garments, making men: this was the logic according to which she was accused of corrupting Somerset as well as Frances Howard” (Materials 78).

Hester Prynne expands this: making garments, she changes culture. She derails every assertion of “dominance and righteousness” which seeks to control her (Dillon 192). Her artistry and activism change the symbolic structure of Puritan Boston; her actions refuse to submit to the Standing Order in ways that become progressively more apparent to ordinary Bostonians. After Arthur dies, the narrative insists that she continues this redefinition through life-changing actions (like making clothes for and ministering to the poor), which enable her to provide Bostonians with ways to reinterpret their collective identity.

Hawthorne comments that more consistent revolutionaries would have also “cast behind them” the “fashions” they believed necessary to “give majesty to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people” (1, 82). Whatever the cause of this ”hereditary taste” (1, 230), it provides the zone of cultural performance that enables Hester’s success, but only because Boston knew when “[h]er needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor” and “military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band” it was hers (1, 83). This artistic connection powers the redefinition which undercuts the discursive construct of “her sin” (1, 83).

Hawthorne links fashion and art as having the power to reshape identities and institutions. At every major point in the narrative, ostensibly ‘male’ characters are ‘unmanned’--or, at least, seduced from their commitments to Standing Order discursive or textual characterizations of masculinity–-by the emotional forces Hester Prynne’s design and artistry induce.

The Hawthorne who imagined the narrative-arc of “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter judges the “enervating magic of place”which makes institutional masculinity to be more dehumanizing than the identities induced by Hester’s art and activism. This deconstruction of the Speaking Aristocracy and the Standing Order puts Hawthorne at odds with the scholarly conviction that “the puritan origins of the American self” happened in Election Sermons, Jeremiads, and discourses.

Next, we begin the Sparke notes section and start working through the main narrative episodes of The Scarlet Letter.

patronage & power

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