Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:34:24.648Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, and The Scarlet Letter: Interactive Selfhoods and the Cultural Construction of Gender

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

T. Walter Herbert Jr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Gender conflicts troubled Hawthorne's personal life and afflicted his daughter Una badly enough to bring on episodes of disabling psychic isturbance. They are likewise inherent in The Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne subverts the norms of womanhood and manhood that were asserted by the domestic ideal, a middle-class version of male dominance then coming to the fore. Yet the work also affirms that those norms provide a measure against which his daughter's aberrations should be corrected. Hawthorne's solution to Una's problem is depicted in Pearl's redemption, so that Una's unhappy later life—as well as Hawthorne's—provides a biographical countertext. By treating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, and The Scarlet Letter as interdefining arenas of conflict, this essay provides a glimpse into the processes by which gender is constructed in persons and works of art.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 103 , Issue 3 , May 1988 , pp. 285 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Bassan, Maurice. Hawthorne's Son: The Life and Literary Career of Julian Hawthorne. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1970.Google Scholar
Baym, Nina. “Thwarted Nature: Nathaniel Hawthorne as Feminist.” American Novelists Revisited. Ed. Fleishmann, Fritz. Boston: Hall, 1982. 58–77.Google Scholar
Beard, George M., and Rockwell, A. D. A Practical Treatise on the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity. New York: Wood, 1875.Google Scholar
Carton, Evan. “‘A Daughter of the Puritans’ and Her Old Master: Hawthorne, Una, and the Sexuality of Romance.” Daughters and Fathers. Ed. Boose, Linda and Flowers, Betty Sue. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, in press.Google Scholar
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.Google Scholar
Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1790–1835. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger, 1966.Google Scholar
Fuller, Margaret. “The Great Lawsuit.” Dial 4 (1843): 1–47.Google Scholar
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Introd. Bernard Rosenthal. New York: Norton, 1971.Google Scholar
Garlitz, Barbara. “Pearl: 1850–1955.” PMLA 72 (1957): 689–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gay, Peter. The Tender Passion. Vol. 2 of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. 2 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic, 1983.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. New York: Norton, 1985. 1148–61.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Elizabeth. Letters, ts. Hawthorne-Manning Collection, Essex Inst., Salem.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Julian. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, 1885.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The American Notebooks. Ed. Simpson, Claude M. Vol. 8 of Hawthorne, Centenary Edition. 1972.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Charvat, William, Harvey Pearce, Roy, and Simpson, Claude M. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962–. 18 vols. to date.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The French and Italian Notebooks. Ed. Woodson, Thomas. Vol. 14 of Hawthorne, Centenary Edition. 1980.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Letters 1843–1853. Ed. Thomas Woodson, L., Smith, Neal, and Pearson, Norman Holmes. Vol. 16 of Hawthorne, Centenary Edition. 1985.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Letters 1857–1864. Ed. Woodson, Thomas, Rubino, James A., Neal Smith, L., and Pearson, Norman Holmes. Vol. 18 of Hawthorne, Centenary Edition. 1987.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Bowers, Fredson and Bruccoli, Matthew J. Vol. 1 of Hawthorne, Centenary Edition. 1962.Google Scholar
Herbert, T. Walter Jr. Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Hull, Raymona. “Una Hawthorne: A Biographical Sketch.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 6 (1976): 87–119.Google Scholar
Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Lathrop, George Parsons. “Biographical Sketch.” Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers by Nathaniel Hawthorne with a Biographical Sketch by George Parsons Lathrop. 1883. Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1972. 441–569.Google Scholar
Leithead, William. Electricity: Its Nature, Operation, and Importance in the Phenomena of the Universe. London: Longman, 1837.Google Scholar
Leverenz, David. “Mrs. Hawthorne's Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1983): 552–75.Google Scholar
Luke, Thomas Davey. Manual of Physio-Therapeutics. New York: Wood, 1926.Google Scholar
Male, Roy R. Hawthorne's Tragic Vision. 1957. New York: Norton, 1964.Google Scholar
Mullaney, Stephen. “Lying like Truth: Riddle, Representation and Treason in Renaissance England.” ELH 47 (1980): 32–47.10.2307/2872437CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullaney, Stephen. “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance.” Representations 3 (1983): 40–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ortner, Sherry B., and Whitehead, Harriet, eds. Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Ragussis, Michael. “Family Discourse and Fiction in The Scarlet Letter.” ELH 49 (1982): 863–88.10.2307/2872902CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, and Lamphere, Louise, eds. Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Ryan, Mary P. The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830–1860. New York: Haworth, 1982.Google Scholar
Shecut, J. L. E. W. “An Essay on the Principles and Properties of the Electric Fluid.” Shecut's Medical and Philosophical Essays. Charleston, 1819. 184–259.Google Scholar
Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Knopf, 1985.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1910.Google Scholar
Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. New York: Bantam, 1980.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.Google Scholar
Whelan, Robert Emmet Jr. “Hester Prynne's Little Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love.” American Literature 39 (1967): 488–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. The Death and Letters of Alice James. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981.Google Scholar