The production of personal life : class, gender, and the psychological in Hawthorne's fiction
This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's psychological themes, the author draws on the history of personal life to suggest that mid-century psychological fictions help, historically, to account for the surfacing of a bourgeois Freadian discourse later in the century. The production of Personal Life also asks why it was that women in mid-century fiction, especially that written by men, were represented as psycholgical targets of male monomaniacs in the home. By connecting the enforcement of middle-class 'feminine' roles to psychological tension between the sexes, Hawthorne's fiction at times implicitly critiques the sentimental construction of gender roles on which the economic and cultural ascendancy of his class relied
Print Book, English, ©1991
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., ©1991
Criticism, interpretation, etc
viii, 252 pages ; 22 cm
9780804719476, 9780804719483, 0804719470, 0804719489
23869901
Introduction: Hawthorne and the history of personal life
Historical birthmarks: Hawthorne and the cultural production of the psychological self
Monsters in the hothouse: Monstrous expectations in "Rappacini's Daughter"
Plotting womanhood: Feminine evolution and narrative feminization in 'Blithedale'
Melville's birthmarks: The feminization industry
Sowing dragons' teeth: Personal life and revolution in 'The Scarlet Letter'
Cleaning house: From the Gothic to the Middle-Class world order
Disciplinary misrepresentation: Reconstructing Miriam's Hand
Coda
Hawthorne, the disturbing influence, and the process of class formation