Cultural Heterotopias and the Spatial Logic of Guilt and Shame: A Comparative Reading of The Scarlet Letter and The New Year’s Sacrifice

This paper offers a culturally oriented comparative reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Lu Xun’s The New Year’s Sacrifice (1924) through Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopia. It explores how central and peripheral spaces encode cultural values and power: the scaffold and the ancestral hall are examined as disciplinary sites through which Puritan and Confucian cultural rituals regulate the body, gender, and moral conduct; the forest and the Earth God Temple are read as counter-sites where Hester and Xianglin’s Wife perform resistance that remains culturally conditioned and limited. By juxtaposing the two texts, the paper highlights the contrast between Western guilt culture and Chinese shame culture in their spatial logic of punishment, confession, shame, and social exclusion. It thereby treats heterotopia as a culturally situated concept and asks how far it can be translated across cultural contexts to illuminate non-Western literary spaces without erasing their local meanings.