The purpose of this thesis is to establish a foundation built on the congruencies between Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, with the aim of addressing two major points: first, the implications of universalizing gender in the context of identity politics; and second, to show how gender universality is challenged within Hawthorne’s fiction and Fuller’s prose. Given that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters depict a range of personal variability, the act of synthesizing Margaret Fuller’s feminist theory with Hawthorne’s fiction functions to link the personal with the political. The overall goal of this study is to substantiate both writers within a feminist discourse and further, as contributory in the fight for gender equality.

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This thesis is a study of the four long romances, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, with emphasis upon Hawthorne's use of symbolism as a means of presenting the basic moral and spiritual truths of human life. The first chapter explains the nature of symbolism and the reasons why Hawthorne used it so extensively. In each of the last four chapters, the symbolism in a single romance is considered for the purpose of discovering the manner and effectiveness of its use in exemplifying the central theme of that particular story. Although Hawthorne's short stories are extremely rich in symbolism, it was not possible to include them in the present study.

Hawthorne is one among the few American writers who have dwelt on the subject of the creative process throughout his works. Through introspection and then skillfully enumerating the necessary elements of artistry, Hawthorne educated his audience in the progression of creating a piece of work. Many changes have taken place in literature since Hawthorne's time, but the basic principles set forth in his theories still hold true. Hawthorne's theories of art and his analysis of the creative process are surely among his most important contributions to literature. In the absence of a long national literary history, he mingled the Actual with the Imaginary and adapted his work to a form of the novel called Romance. With materials he could find concerning the short history of his country, he showed how past events influence the present. He examined the creative process that took place in his own work and shared with posterity the conditions under which he created.

This thesis examines the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the archetypal images therein. The Scarlet Letter is discussed extensively with references made to The Blithedale Romance. Characters in the following short stories are referred to: “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Birthmark.” An overall analysis of feminine repression in both male and female characters is explored. Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Pearl are the subjects of lengthy discussion. Journeys, both inward and outward are explored in the characters. The context is nineteenth-century culture of which Hawthorne is a product. The characters in The Scarlet Letter search for a complete existence, an integration of the unconscious and the conscious. Through a mythological study of Hawthorne’s work, we draw closer to understanding this complex example of nineteenth-century literature.

My dissertation, The Endless Roar in which We Live: The Figure of Noise in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Fiction is the first extended study that locates an intersection between sound studies and literary studies in order to examine noise as it defines spaces and places, and the characters that live and work in them, in American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century. I evaluate noise in a sampling of American fiction, and consider how the imagined sounds of fiction echo nineteenth-century soundscapes and underscore contemporary discernment of noises – and sometimes the lack of noises – in the national consciousness. I consider the street noise that the upper classes wished away, the factory noise that so many women workers spent a lifetime hearing, and the resounding noise of the United States’ expansion westward. Conversely, I also consider how authors and characters respond to the noises that penetrate their ears and create their soundscapes. Together, these considerations shape my argument that sounds help to construct and characterize localities, just as certain places construct particular sounds. Moreover, however, I argue that noise creates spaces wherein identities – such as those of gender, class, and ethnicity – also often tied to place, are discovered, defined, and challenged. In many ways, classifications of noise are subjective and varied, depending on who makes and who hears the noise, where and why the noise is produced, and how and by whom is the noise interpreted. Considering noise as malleable and interpretable based on context allows me to most effectively examine noise as a facilitator of identity formation.

Narrative, Gender, and Masquerade tracks the way the American novel of manners structures itself on representations of a pair of purportedly opposite and opposing women, the fair, innocent girl and the dark, tempting seductress. This opposition increasingly merges into sameness even as the novel in which it appears labors to keep the two characters separate in order to stabilize its textual architecture of thematic and formal binaries. Presenting itself as a text closely related to a social reality, the American novel of manners is structured as a masquerade: purporting to reveal as it conceals, conjuring readerly doubt as to the nature of both mask and reality. There are two main theoretical traditions in the study of masquerade. The first, the anthropologically-inflected cultural and literary historical approach to masks and masquerade, typically is applied to literary texts to explain religious and political historical exigencies as reflected in a given work of literature. The second, the psychoanalically-based theory of femininity as a masquerade, is most often deployed to use the text as a means of explaining the male gaze, desire, and gender performance. My reading of the American novel as gendered rests on dissolving the disciplinary borders between the two, thereby focusing reading on the form of the novel as well as its relation to its cultural, historical, and literary context. The novels I analyze situate women into stereotypical binary roles of the virgin and the seductress. These narratives register a duality between reality and representation that is analogous to the gender masking the novels take as their theme.

I argue that the procession is a deliberate, desirable, and destabilizing social formation. In scholarship of the American nineteenth century, the procession is lost among the clutter of other urban assemblies—crowds, parades, riots—and never fully articulated as a unique vehicle for collective expression. The procession is an attractive alternative to tyrannical majorities and unwise crowds because of its linearity, rationality, and encompassment. Central to the trope of the procession, however, is the wayside or the periphery, adjacent spaces which are often discarded or suppressed by the procession’s forward movement. I trace the variations of this American allegory—national progress and its exclusions—across different genres in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne (domestic-cosmic sketches), Walt Whitman (war-time poetic fantasies), Emily Dickinson (regal satires), and as an informing but repudiated element of Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or The Huts of America. These authors critique chaotic and gaudy groups, and instead propose gentle and haptic ones. Whitman, Dickinson, and Delany also have in common their oblique contemplations of the Civil War and President Lincoln’s assassination. Although Lincoln’s multi-state funeral procession is an overwrought spectacle, the procession is so often virtuous because it is the opposite of the state funeral: the authors I consider presuppose, in their sporadic ways, an austere nature to the procession, as fundamental as the dictums “We, the people” or E pluribus unum. Yet, the “grand difficulty,” in Hawthorne’s words, is that in reality and on the streets, the procession’s conceptual intuitiveness—as all-inclusive and leveling as a “procession of life”—recedes from view, deteriorates into chaos, and must be constantly rehabilitated. My tropological analysis of American literature grapples with a vision of democratic organization and process that is not conceived of as the result of collective self-articulation and -determination. What is startling about membership in a procession is how often it does not respect individual choice. It is coercive; you are participating. The procession’s “measured and beautiful motion,” in Whitman’s words, topples assertive modes of authorship, leadership, and ownership because ever-present waysides flatten the hierarchy of center over periphery. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-03 12:51:58.064

The diploma thesis is focused on analysis and interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne?s literature work and its specific theme: the role of the forest and its ethical aspects in particular stories. The principle of this work is focused on general relationship between American literature and the theme of the forest, which is deeply rooted in the history of American colonization and creating new American nation. The main aim is to point out the specific role of the forest in American literature (especially the influence of puritanism and transcendentalism). Another aim is to find out if the forest really represents important moral aspects and influences the behaviour of both individuals and the whole society in Hawthorne?s work. Answers to these questions can be found in the fundamental part of the diploma thesis, which is based on the literary analysis of particular texts, novels and short stories, in which the world of the forest is confronted with the problems of morality and faith.

This study is not concerned with the evaluation of Hawthorne's artistic criticism but with the uses he made art objects in his writing. Such a study should give suggestions for interpretation of his works, as well as information concerning literary devices and technique in style. It should consider the contribution of the art objects to the literary artistry of the works in which they appear. Such a study has not previously been made.