Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1992

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

William H. Shurr

Committee Members

Allison R. Ensor, George B. Hutchinson, Susan Becker

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are marked by his own struggle for gender identity, as it is expressed through his major characters. Often this struggle is most noticeable in relation to his strongest and most admirable female characters, particularly Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter,, Hepzibah in The House of the Seven Gables, Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, and Miriam in The Marble Faun. These women display not only sex role reversals in their relationships with the male characters, but also androgynous personality characteristics that most interested Hawthorne himself. Yet not only the women, but also many male characters are role-reversed and androgynous; in the case of the men, however, the assumption of feminine attributes tends to detract from, rather than add to, their power. Other characters, representing the very traditional sex roles of the nineteenth century, are less successful and appear as type­ figures in the majority of the works.

Hawthorne’s tendency to interchange sex roles and include androgynous personality characteristics in his strongest characters, particularly the women, may be traced from his earliest writings through the body of his work. The reasons for the diffusion arise from Hawthorne's own sex role models; his father died during the author's early childhood, and he was surrounded from then on primarily by women until he left for college.

Although Hawthorne was to grow into successful adulthood, he suffered many problems with his own gender identity and was influenced by these problems throughout his life, particularly in his writing. His chief role model and muse was his mother, with whom he personally identified and upon whom he based his strong female characters. His struggle to disengage from emotional dependence upon his mother is reflected in the lives of the characters whom he most admired but continually defeated in his works.

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