Production of Personal Life / Joel Pfister.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pfister, Joel, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-186.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.

Literature and society--United States--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

Psychological fiction, American--History and criticism.

Psychological fiction, American.

Middle class in literature.

Psychology in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 252 pages)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1991.

Summary:

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 Freudian 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 psychological 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgments

Contents

A Note to the Reader

Introduction. Hawthorne and the History of Personal Life

1. Historical Birthmarks. Hawthorne and the Cultural Production of the Psychological Self

2. Monsters in the Hothouse. Monstrous Expectations in "Rappacini's Daughter"

3. Plotting Womanhood. Feminine Evolution and Narrative Feminization in 'Blithedale'

4. Melville's Birthmarks. The Feminization Industry

5. Sowing Dragons' Teeth. Sowing Dragons' Teeth

6. Cleaning House. From the Gothic to the Middle

Class World Order

7. Disciplinary Misrepresentation. Reconstructing Miriam's Hand

Coda. Hawthorne, the Disturbing Influence, and the Process of Class Formation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [221]-240) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8047-6654-1

OCLC:

1312725984