THIS RAG OF SCARLET CLOTH: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S ABORTION

This essay argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) incorporates a threatening non -reproductive ideology from nineteenth-century print culture into its seventeenth-century setting, casting the birth of its famous protagonist's daughter in relation to abortion's alternative and the book's own composition in relation to nothingness. It is through the subject of abortion, which circulated with high visibility in advertisements and other printed material in antebellum New England cities, that The Scarlet Letter's attention to such concepts as adultery, birth, life, and citizenship finds new and ironic force. Hester Prynne's characterization as her community's scapegoat, moreover, aligns with reports about the scandalous midwife-abortionist Madame Restell that circulated in the press throughout the 1840s.