ABSTRACT
Apart from one perilous moment in the famous “forest scene,” there really are not many temptations of the flesh in The Scarlet Letter. Yet none of Hawthorne’s moral severity kept one reviewer from wondering if this fictional venture into the mores of the past did not signal the beginning in America of a lascivious tendency already well under way in France. After all, observed the same reviewer, the subject was nothing but the “nauseous amour of a Puritan pastor.” In The Blithedale Romance, however, all hell breaks loose. Coverdale’s final confession names Priscilla, but it is Zenobia his eyes were undressing at the beginning of the story; and, with an ardent Melville in the background, critics think he might better have named Hollingsworth. Then there is that “damned mob of scribbling women,” making a much better buck than The Scarlet Letter but failing of the canon until properly reclaimed by feminist scholars.
