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This study shows similarities in the attitudes of and literary influences upon Maurice Maeterlinck and Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially in Maeterlinck's drama Pelleas et Melisande and Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter. Circumstantial evidence indicates Maeterlinck's familiarity with Hawthorne's novel. Since no previous comparative study of Pelleas et Melisande and The Scarlet Letter exists, the works themselves are the major sources of information.

This study examines the crisis of identity the United States was experiencing in the nineteenth-century through two of the major literary works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun. Hawthorne, who lived through this crucial and important developmental period, was concerned as to what this identity would be, how the United States would shape and define itself, and what its future would be if this identity was malformed. In addition, this study will look at counter-monuments as argued by James E. Young in his essay “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today” to expand on these issues of identity. If according to Young, the ideal goal of the counter-monument is “not to remain fixed but to change,” one can conclude that Hawthorne understood that national identity must be fluid; otherwise, the nation would crumble under the pressure and force of change.

In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized conception of the witch and where a different prosopography of the historical witch emerges. Next, I will assess a short sample of nineteenth-century American pulp fiction to demonstrate the historical impact of America’s erotically decoded witch type on fictionalized versions or caricatures of the witch. In doing so I hope to create a reading that informs a more transatlantically complex representation of The Scarlet Letter. Finally, in order to underscore the significance of these national and historical departures of The Scarlet Letter as a gothic novel, I will contrast Hawthorne’s novel with a selective reading of nineteenth-century gothic texts from England and France that employ the witch or demonic feminine motif in an erotically codified and fantastic setting, namely using Old World magic and history that draws from French and English traditions.To demonstrate the significance of erotically coded witches in the British tradition, I will briefly examine Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” as a gothic text that relies heavily on the erotic affect encoded in the figure of Geraldine. I will also touch on Prosper Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille” and Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte Amoreuse,” two remarkable short stories that highlight the sublime terror of sexually deviant, occult female figures. Through such a collection of readings of witches and erotic, occult women I hope to amplify a more latent theme underlying The Scarlet Letter and America’s conflicted relationship with the gothic tradition: namely its crucial lack of erotic enchantment as a channel for the experience of gothic affect, the fantastic, and even sublime terror.

<p>This study is an examination of the developing self-consciousness of three female protagonists in three different novels. Chapter One is a discussion of the detrimental social factors that hinder the complete selfdevelopment of Hester Prynne in the seventeenth-century New England environment of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Chapter Two investigates the emerging consciousness of self of Edna Pontellier and her subsequent failure to achieve an autonomy that permits her to integrate into the confining, social climate of Chopin's nineteenth-century Creole environment in The Awakening. Chapter three is the examination of the repressive forces in the futuristic society of Gilead that serve as a barrier to the development of a unified self for Offred in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In all three chapters of the thesis, I argue that each female protagonist's struggle to successfully assert the self, and to extend the self toward genuine relationships with others, is not actualized. This study attempts to show the precarious hold of the self that the female protagonist demonstrates in each of these three works of fiction. Throughout the body of the text, an abbreviated form iii iv will be used for the three primary novels examined. The reference consists of the underlined initials of the title of the novel followed by the page number, all contained within parentheses. The abbreviations are as follows: TSL for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, TA for Chopin's The Awakening, and THT for Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.</p> / Master of English

This thesis is a study of three of Hawthorne's long romances, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun, with particular attention to his use of phenomena having the appearance of the supernatural as a means of exemplifying the theme of his romances.

This project is a discussion of the continuing need to address gender issues while teaching core curriculum in English classes at the secondary level.

America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury. To recreate the Garden myth, Americans have had to reimagine Eve as the idealized virgin, earth mother and life-giver, or as Adam's loyal helpmeet, the silent figurehead. But Eve resists her new roles: Hester Prynne embellishes her scarlet letter and does not leave Boston; the feminine forces in Moby-Dick defeat the monomaniacal masculinity of Ahab; Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, and Aunt Sally's threat of civilization chase Huck off to the territory despite the beckoning of the feminine river; Daisy retreats unscathed into her "white palace" after Gatsby's death; and Caddy tours Europe on the arm of a Nazi officer long after Quentin's suicide, Benjy's betrayal, and Jason's condemnation. Each of these male writers--Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner--deals with the American dream differently; however, in each case the dream fails because Eve will not go away, refusing to be the Other, the scapegoat, or the muse to man's dreams. These works all deal in some way with the notion of the masculine American dream of perfection in the Garden at the expense of a fully realized feminine presence. This failure of the American dream accounts for the decidedly tragic tone of these culturally significant American novels.