This essay examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary treatment of the legal battle
between religious dissident Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) and the Puritan establishment
of Massachusetts in his early piece “Mrs. Hutchinson” (1830) and in
his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter (1850). In “Mrs. Hutchinson”, Hawthorne utilized
the story of a woman whom Puritan authorities labeled an ‘antinomian’
(i.e. ‘an opponent of the law’) as a jumping-off point to decry the presence of
women in the public sphere in his own time. In particular, Hawthorne sounded
the alarm about the growing number of women writers who, in his view, represented
a menace to the creation of a strong American literature. Simultaneously
troubled and fascinated by Hutchinson, Hawthorne chose her as a model for his
heroine Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. In this novel Anne Hutchinson in a
sense re-lives as Hester Prynne, whose confrontation with the Boston magistracy
and clergy, especially in the first chapters, closely recalls the civil and religious
trials brought against her predecessor.
