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Intertextual representation in Hawthorne's fiction: Spectacular metaphors in the major novels
Abstract
Metaphors of spectacle in Hawthorne's four major published novels provide a means of analyzing a range of concerns from character motivation and behavior to social organization and the institution of personal and/or political controls. I have taken "spectacle" to be "an organized visual display"; this definition includes elements such as performances, artworks, and works on paper, all of which are marked within the text by an announcement or frame indicating the introduction of a presentation. Each novel begins with a spectacle which introduces themes that are thereby made available for a cultural critique. For example, the action of The Scarlet Letter opens with the scene of Hester standing before the townspeople of Boston wearing a scarlet letter A on her dress. This spectacle--both the letter itself and the staging of it at the center of an assertion of legal power--initiates an organizing motif for the entire novel. As a potentially powerful vehicle of social control, spectacle provides an illustration of contestation among multiple interests in areas such as gender formation, the administration of the law, and the role of the arts. Each novel explores the effectiveness of various strategies for the establishment of effects in social relations, demonstrating the tenuousness of attempts by individuals or institutions to enforce particular configurations on others. Hawthorne's fictions suggest possibilities for resistance to dominant depictions of relations by situating selected characters in regard to the characteristic spectacle of a particular situation. Since spectacle highlights in compact, dramatic form the convergence of social forces, its study facilitates the implementation of a variety of analytical approaches, including new historicist, psychoanalytic, reader response, feminist, and deconstructionist. This dissertation will utilize methodologies drawn from these approaches in an application of close reading in order to elucidate a theory of spectacle as it operates within Hawthorne's four major novels, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
Fisher, Rebecca S, "Intertextual representation in Hawthorne's fiction: Spectacular metaphors in the major novels" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9329606.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9329606