Towards a Sustainable Culture of Textual Sexuality: The Textual Delineation of the Sexual Instinct in the Scarlet Letter

Abstract

This study explores the textual delineation of the sexual instinct in The Scarlet Letter from a cultural ecological paradigm. Based on Hubert Zapf’s 2017 book, Literature as a Cultural Ecology , a cultural ecological paradigm is an explorative perspective of literature which views literature as a special form of ecological knowledge with an aim to connect and integrate the cultural system with its evolutionary and ecological roots. Such a harmonization of the cultural and natural spheres, balances the cultural system, making literature a source and site of cultural sustainability. The underlying premise of the study is that if literature aims to reconnect the culture to its ecological roots, the most fundamental and basic of all these roots is the sexual instinct. Therefore, literature, as a form of sustainable textual sexuality, serves to rehabilitate the undeniable role of the sexual instinct, whenever and wherever; it is repressed and marginalized by the other dominant cultural discourses, making it a sustainable form of sexual textuality. Thus, the novel, when viewed from such a sexual perspective of literary textuality, serves an important ecological function, that is, the rehabilitation of the existence of the reproductive instinct, in the cultural sphere, against its suppression and marginalization by the dominant cultural discourse systems. Such a counter cultural textual delineation of the sexual instinct makes the novel a source and site of reproductive sustainability, since it highlights the pathological consequences of its lack in a cultural system, foregrounds its importance to the existence of human species, and tries to reconnect it to the larger cultural system.