The Adulteress in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Culture

In mid-nineteenth century America, the adulteress became a significant literary and cultural figure, one which was linked to some of the most hotly debated issues of the period: public womanhood, the separation of gendered spheres, female sexuality, woman's rights and anxieties about immigration. 'The Adulteress in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Culture" offers a feminist and historical reading of the figure of female adultery in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Marfa Amparo Ruiz de Burton. In order to support my analysis, I have studied an array of cultural materials from the nineteenth-century, such as transcripts of landmark trials, anti-suffrage literature, sermons and conduct books. In chapter one, I examine sensational cases of white female adultery, exploring both the legal history of adultery and the contemporary rhetoric of ideal womanhood--necessary contexts for understanding the fictional portrayals of the adulteress. In chapter two, I analyze anti­suffrage literature in which the woman's vote is equated wjth a wild and adulterous sexual desire that contradicts the dominant construction of womanhood and, thus, threatens the stability of American society. In chapter three, I argue that the opening scaffold scene of The Scarlet Letter (1850) presents Hester Prynne simultaneously as a seventeenth-century criminal and as a nineteenth-century ''public woman," a recognizable type associated wjth the critique of women's sphere and sexual promiscuity. In the novel, Hawthorne aligns Hester with Anne Hutchinson, the renowned female public speaker of colonial America, making them both, figuratively speaking, the transgressive foremothers of notorious women like Frances Wright, a well-publicized female orator in nineteenth-century America. During the nineteenth-century, the composition of America was rapidly changing. As poor immigrants came to the coasts in search of work and settlers confronted the "foreign" citizens of the Mexican territories, race and class prejudices were exacerbated. In chapters four and five, I juxtapose Stowe's didactic depiction of the adulteress as an indication of the foreign contamination of American morals in Pink and White Tvranny (1870) wjth Ruiz de Burton's satirical portrayal of the adulteress as an expression of the nation's inherent immorality in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872).