Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family

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University of California Press, 15. veebr 1993 - 331 pages
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.
 

Contents

Indices of a Problem
3
Zenobias Ghost
18
NUMINOUS MATES
31
The Queen of All She Surveys
37
Portrait of the Artist as a SelfMade Man
59
Subservient Angel
74
Democratic Mythmaking in The House of the Seven Gables
88
MARITAL POLITICS
107
Domesticity as Redemption
199
ROMAN FEVER
213
City of the Soul
215
Repudiations and Inward War
225
The Lions of Lust
240
Spiritual Laws
248
The Poet as Patriarch
256
Epilogue
273

Inward and Eternal Union
113
Transplanting the Garden of Eden
126
Androgynous Paradise Lost
138
SoulSystem in Salem
161
Double Marriage Double Adultery
184
Acknowledgments
285
Notes
289
Works Cited
311
Copyright

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About the author (1993)

T. Walter Herbert is University Scholar and Brown Professor of English at Southwestern University. He is the author of Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (1977) and Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (1980).

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