Dearest beloved : the Hawthornes and the making of the middle-class family / / T. Walter Herbert [[electronic resource]]

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910495956203321
• Autore: Herbert T. Walter (Thomas Walter), <1938->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley, : University of California Press, c1993
• ISBN: 0-520-91656-5; 0-585-16122-4
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xx, 331 p. ) : ill.
• Collana: The New historicism :studies in cultural poetics ; ; 24
• Disciplina: 813/.3; B
• Soggetti: Domestic fiction, American - History and criticism; Novelists, American - 19th century; Authors' spouses - United States; Psychoanalysis and literature; Middle class in literature; Marriage in literature; Family in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: "A Centennial book"
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-322) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Note on Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part I: Critical Vortex -- 1. Indices of a Problem -- 2. Zenobia's Ghost -- Part II: Numinous Mates -- Introduction -- 3. The Queen of All She Surveys -- 4. Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Made Man -- 5. Subservient Angel -- 6. Democratic Mythmaking in The House of the Seven Gables -- Part III: Marital Politics -- Introduction -- 7. Inward and Eternal Union -- 8. Transplanting the Garden of Eden -- 9. Androgynous Paradise Lost -- 10. Soul-System in Salem -- 11. Double Marriage, Double Adultery -- 12. Domesticity as Redemption -- Part IV: Roman Fever -- 13. City of the Soul -- 14. Repudiations and Inward War -- 15. The Lions of Lust -- 16. Spiritual Laws -- 17. The Poet as Patriarch -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne-for their ; contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness-was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.