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

Herbert, T. Walter

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0520075870 ISBN 13 : 9780520075870

Editeur : University of California Press, 1993

Synopsis

The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne - for their contemporaries a model of true love and happiness - was also a scene of revulsion and combat. In this penetrating study, T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within 19th-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. Using the Hawthorne's private journals, Herbert traces both the feminist rage hidden in Sophia's wifely subservience and the crippling anxieties that attended Nathaniel's pursuit of manly success. While the Hawthornes looked forward to the coming of the children - whose divine innocence would complete their paradise - those children became the objects of an intense but damaging love. And even as the terrible domestic drama lent imaginative power to Nathaniel's writing, his life and work were generating new middle-class definitions of the family.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

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).

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 1993
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520075870
• ISBN 13: 9780520075870
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 331
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible