Nathaniel Hawthorne's gendered othersExposing conventions through gender

Resumo

The title of my dissertation is Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gendered Others: Exposing Conventions through Gender. This is so because its main goal is to show that Hawthorne uses his female characters to take elements from both novels and romances depending on the needs of each narrative. I believe that he was neither writing a novel proper, nor a romance, but a hybrid genre, one of his own making. To prove that Hawthorne merges two genres into one, I focus my analysis on his female characters, paying special attention to what I have termed 'Hawthorne's subversive heroines'. His approach to these characters can be regarded as quite progressive for a 19th-century male author. I intend to prove that Hawthorne used his heroines to subvert the literary conventions of his period. Hence his emphasis on the genre he was allegedly using, since genre was, after all, one of those conventions. Furthermore, through his subversive heroines, Hawthorne can be said to be exposing some of the social conventions of his times, such as: the excessive importance granted to appearances, the oppressive weight of family traditions and lineage upon individuals, and the role women played within society. This dissertation contains, therefore, two cornerstones, genre and gender, that come down to one, gender. Hawthorne's female characters dramatize both the social criticism and the undermining of genre as yet another socially established convention. The first aspect analyzed in this dissertation is genre. Nathaniel Hawthorne's body of work is inevitably linked to the concept of 'romance.' This is so because there was no clear cut distinction between novel and romance. He was the one who brought up the subject in "The Custom-House", the preface to The Scarlet Letter. What is more, sometimes the terms novel and romance were used interchangeably. I consider Hawthorne's comments about romance in his prefaces a literary maneuver to achieve a "certain latitude" that would allow him to expose certain flaws of his society. Regarding the progressive treatment Hawthorne gave to his female characters, if we examine some of the major texts in American literature, we will observe that female characters, if there are any, are assigned unimportant roles. Hawthorne was not free of blame in this anti-feminine sentiment. His sentence about "the scarlet mob of scribbling women" has been read by most modern and contemporary feminist critics as a sign of his deprecatory attitude towards female writers of popular fiction. As I intend to show, such a heated criticism against Hawthorne was due to a decontextualized reading of his texts. As a matter of fact, some other feminist critics have brought to light the independence Hawthorne granted his female characters and how strong some of them are. My analysis revolves around his subversive heroines and the difference, even though small, their actions made.