28
Many forget that the Scarlet Letter opens in a “Custom House” in 19
th
century
America, not on a scaffolding in 17
th
century New England. Over the entrance of this
civil post of “Uncle Sam’s government” sits an ornamental eagle. Of this great symbol of
American democracy, Hawthorne writes,
many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the
wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the
softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness,
even in her best moods, and, sooner or later . . . is apt to fling off her nestlings,
with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed
arrows. (6)
It would certainly be a stretch to say that Hawthorne sees American democracy of the
19
th
century as undifferentiated from New England Puritanism of the 17
th
century. But it
is also true that American democracy does not come out of The Scarlet Letter looking
like the model of genuine charity Hawthorne criticized Boston for failing to be.
In the Blithedale Romance Hawthorne also shows the futility and danger of
utopian schemes dedicated to anti-capitalist equality and removal of all traditional moral
restraints—a world completely opposite of Winthrop’s Boston. According to Coverdale,
the narrator of this story, it
very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, stood in a position
new hostitlity, rather than new brotherhood . . . We were inevitabley estranged
from the rest of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual
bond among ourselves. (Hawthorne 1986, 20-21)
Yet Hawthorne goes on to show that even the internal “mutual bond” among this
community was not nearly as strong as Coverdale first assumes. By the end of the story,
natural sexual desire unchained from established mores ultimately destroys, character by
character, a hoped for happiness found in an environment of perfect equality and non-
competitive camaraderie (Zuckert 1990, 71-83). In the end, Blithedale not only lacked
Convention