“The Puritans of Today”: The Anti-Whig Argument of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This essay explores the polemical context in which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. It pays particular attention to the Whig movement for moral reform in antebellum America, which sought to merge church and state. Democrats like Hawthorne took exception to this attempt to establish “moral government” in America. His novel argues for an ideal of personal freedom in moral matters and criticizes the Whig attempt to impose restrictive moral norms on human, especially sexual, proclivities that Democrats such as Hawthorne felt were embodiments of spirituality in nature. The novel refers obliquely to contemporary religious debates that have been ignored by scholars, such as that concerning Horace Bushnell's God in Christ, a book whose presence in Hawthorne's novel is palpable. Bushnell was put on trial for heresy in 1849, as Hawthorne was composing his novel. In the novel, Hawthorne enters those debates and takes the side of natural religion against the Whig ideal of moral government.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".