The Home and the Asylum. Antebellum Representations of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (54) ◽  
pp. 6-15
Author(s):  
Maria Kaspirek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
True Womanhood ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood

This paper presents an analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables regarding his depiction of the nineteenth-century ideals of femininity: the cult of true womanhood and domesticity. Drawing primarily on original material, it will be shown that emerging nineteenth-century psychiatry – asylum medicine – has strongly corroborated American ideals of femininity and their presumably restorative influence in cases of mental derangement. Hawthorne’s portrayals of women and madmen negotiate antebellum concepts of femininity and psychiatry, juxtapose the asylum against the home, and emphasize the author’s embeddedness in nineteenth-century medico-psychological theories.

scholarly journals (Un)Dress in Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Portraits: Clytie, Proserpine, and Antebellum Boston Women

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Margo L. Beggs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
White Skin ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
True Womanhood ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Young America ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood ◽  
Hiram Powers ◽  
White Elite

Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (2005) is a monumental exhibition catalogue showcasing the work of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Together the partners established a renowned daguerreotype studio in mid-nineteenth-century Boston that catered to the city’s bourgeoisie. This paper seeks to unravel the mystery of dozens of daguerreotypes found in Young America, in which elite Boston women appear to be nearly nude. The unidentified women stand in stark contrast to the carefully concealed bodies of Southworth & Hawes’ other female subjects. Why would they expose themselves in such a manner before the camera’s lens? This paper attributes the women’s state of (un)dress to their deliberate emulation of two sculptures in the classical tradition: Clytie, a marble bust dating to antiquity, and Proserpine, a mid-nineteenth-century marble bust by American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers. This argument first reveals how a general “classical statue” aesthetic prevailed for women’s deportment in antebellum America, then demonstrates that the busts of Clytie and Proserpine had special significance as icons of white, elite female beauty in the period. Next, this paper makes the case that Southworth & Hawes devised a special style of photography deriving from their own daguerreotypes of the two statues, in which the women’s off-shoulder drapery was deliberately obscured allowing their female clientele to pose in the guise of these famous statues. The paper concludes by arguing that the women shown in these images could pose in this style without contravening societal norms, as these mythological figures were construed by women and men in the period to reflect the central precepts of the mid-nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood.” Moreover, the busts offered sartorial models that reinforced standards of female dress as they related to class and privilege. By baring their flawless, white skin, however, the women positioned themselves at the crux of contentious beliefs about race in a deeply divided nation prior to the American Civil War.

The Scarlet Letter

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Cindy Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Hester Prynne

Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.' With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of two very different men, as moral codes and legal imperatives painfully collide. Set in the Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, The Scarlet Letter also sheds light on the nineteenth-century in which it was written, as Hawthorne explores his ambivalent relations with his Puritan forebears. The text of this edition is taken from the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne's works, the most authoritative critical edition.

"Depravity Dressed up in a Fascinating Garb": Sentimental Motifs and the Seduced Hero(ine) in The Scarlet Letter

1999 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-335
Author(s):  
Erika M. Kreger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Moral Framework

When we place Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) in the context of the literary debates of the 1840s and 1850s, it becomes apparent that the novel inhabits a conventional moral position that affiliates it with, rather than distinguishes it from, the best-selling domestic novels of the era. The Scarlet Letter shares a common moral framework and pattern of imagery with many works by nineteenth-century female novelists. Like these writers, Hawthorne uses his characters to emphasize the destructive consequences of allowing personal desire to overrule community law. The portrayals of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne critique the traits of the eighteenth-century seduced heroine and privilege the qualities of the nineteenth-century protagonist of domestic fiction. Hawthorne's hapless minister is depicted in the physically drooping, ethically weak image of the eighteenth-century heroine; while his "fallen woman" possesses the strength, selflessness, and positive influence attributed to the nineteenth-century protagonist. This powerful iconography allows Hawthorne to reinforce the social values most often advocated in the public discourse about fiction, while still avoiding the explicit didactic remarks that critics condemned. The Scarlet Letter's "moral" closely links it to the conservative worldview of antebellum middle-class culture and popular fiction.

The Scaffold in the Marketplace

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-395
Author(s):  
Helen Deutsch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Way

Samuel Johnson haunted the nineteenth-century American literary imagination, and there is no more compelling example of this than Nathaniel Hawthorne, who modeled his uniquely reticent form of authorial exemplarity in Johnson’s sociable shadow. This essay looks at a neglected dimension of Hawthorne’s historical and moral endeavor in his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), by considering his fascination with both the great Augustan moralist and the elusive, mobile, and seminal historical genre that shaped that fascination, the anecdote. The genre of exemplarity par excellence, the anecdote is also, in Joel Fineman’s words, “the literary form that uniquely lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end.” The anecdote is thus the “hole within the whole” from which alternative histories, including the true histories known as romances, can emerge. Hawthorne’s lifelong preoccupation with James Boswell’s anecdote of Johnson’s penance in Uttoxeter Market roots a uniquely American fictional hero (aka Arthur Dimmesdale) and Hawthorne’s distinctively melancholic mode of American authorship, in Johnson’s English singularity.

scholarly journals Taking a Perspective: Hawthorne's Concept of Language and Nineteenth-Century Language Theory

1997 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia M. Roger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Language Theory ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Political View ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Language Study

This essay examines Hathorne's concept of language and the characteristic indeterminacy of his writing in the context of nieteenth-century language study. Recently, two opposing theoretical postionss have emerged to account for this indeterminacy-the deconstructionist view as exemplified by J. Hillis Miller's analysis of "The Minister's Black Veil" and the more historical and political view that Jonathan Arac Takes in "The Politics of The Scarlet Letter." I argue that although Hawthorne's indeterminacy may invite a deconstructionist analysis, it is a product of his historical context, not ours, and although, as Arac argues. Hawthornes's indeterminacy may be connected to a politics of avoidance, it more directly arises out of the linguistic and philosophical issues being debated by his contemporaries. In his Notebooks and his fiction Hawthorne responds to these issues by experimenting with possible relations between literal and figurative meanings and with the role played by perspective in determining these meanings. In order to show the interaction bertweenn Hawthorne's writing and the context of mindineteenth-century language study, I first briefly outline this context; then, using examples from his Notebooks. I describe Hawthorne's concept of language; and finally, with "Rappaccini's Daughter" as an example. I show how in his fiction Hawthorne experiments with the language theories of his contemporaries.

Pearl: 1850–1955

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 689-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Garlitz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Order ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Goodness ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Moral Indifference ◽  
The One ◽  
Good And Evil

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

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