The veiled gaze : vision, intimacy, and gendered subjectivities in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction

246 Pages·1993·8.5 MB·English

by  Kelsey, Angela, 1964-

THE VEILED GAZE: VISION, INTIMACY, AND GENDERED
SUBJECTIVITIES IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S FICTION
By
ANGELA KELSEY
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1993
Copyright 1993
by
Angela Kelsey
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT iv
INTRODUCTION 1
NOTES 16
CHAPTERS
1 MRS. WAKEFIELD'SGAZE 22
NOTES 45
2 SENSE INTERMIXTURE IN
"RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER" 47
NOTES 82
3 MIRROR, MIRROR: "THE BIRTH-MARK" AND
"FEATHERTOP" 90
NOTES 126
4 "SELF-SHUDDERINGS" AND "THE WITCHERY OF
DRESS" IN "THE MINISTER'S BLACK VEIL"
AND "LADY ELEANORE'S MANTLE" 130
NOTES 175
5 THE GAZE, SELF-CONSTRUCTION, AND CASTRATION
IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE 181
NOTES 227
WORKSCITED 231
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 239
iii
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
THE VEILED GAZE: VISION, INTIMACY, AND GENDERED
SUBJECTIVITIES IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S FICTION
By
Angela Kelsey
December 1993
Chairperson: David Leverenz
Major Department: English
In the years 1830-1860, during which Hawthorne wrote
most of his fiction, a variety of forces worked directly and
indirectly to increase American society's interest in sight,
voyeurism, appearances, and an elaborate system of
disciplinary practices for women. In this study I argue
that, particularly in his short fiction and The Blithedale
Romance, Hawthorne and his various male narrators play out
his and his society's anxieties over vision, veiling,
intimacy, and gendered subjectivities.
—
The female characters I discuss here in Chapter One,
Mrs. Wakefield of "Wakefield"; in Chapter Two, Beatrice
Rappaccini of "Rappaccini's Daughter"; in Chapter Three,
Georgiana of "The Birth-mark" and Mother Rigby of
"Feathertop"; in Chapter Four, Elizabeth of "The Minister's
Black Veil" and Lady Eleanore of "Lady Eleanore's Mantle";
and in Chapter Five, Zenobia and Priscilla of The Blithedale
—
Romance represent a wide variety of responses to the gaze.
IV
As they and their actions define femininity or a feminine
subject position for Hawthorne, that position shifts
constantly.
Male characters and narrators are similarly at odds
with a shifting standard of masculinity. Hawthorne's male
characters in the stories discussed in this study do not
possess stable identities. Wakefield risks descending into
oblivion after his attempt to own the gaze. By the end of
"Rappaccini's Daughter," Giovanni's and Rappaccini's
attempts to control femininity leave them "blasted."
Aylmer's attempt at mastery of his wife and an always
feminine Nature in "The Birth-mark" leaves his wife dead and
him with another instance of failure to record in his folio.
Reverend Hooper valiantly tries to escape the nakedness that
he fears will come with intimacy with Elizabeth; his black
veil, however, does not protect him from the contaminating
monstrosity that he associates with femininity. And
Coverdale, despite his attempts to fill himself with the
details others hide, is reduced to a man alone with his
material comforts. In all of these texts Hawthorne
constructs and then dissects gendered subjectivities, both
feminine and masculine.
V
INTRODUCTION
During the years 1830-1860, a variety of forces worked
directly and indirectly to increase American society's focus
on women's bodies and their management. This era saw the
rise of the cult of true womanhood and the doctrine of
separate spheres for women and men; an increase in urban
growth and class upheaval; and the growth of social reform
movements, particularly abolition, feminism, temperance,
anti-prostitution, and health and fashion reform. Historian
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued that this flux led to an
increase in the degree of specificity of body maintenance
and etiquette rules for women, many of which would be
regulated by visual means, in the culture's attempt to
maintain or restore social order.^ Also during the years
1830-1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote most of his fiction.
In this dissertation, I will argue that, particularly in his
short fiction and The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne and his
various male narrators play out his society's anxieties
concerning femininity, masculinity, and the new visual
perspectives that worked to construct subjectivity.
We can place Hawthorne's interest in voyeurism within
the larger context of vision, voyeurism, and gazing,
particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century.^
1
s s
2
More specifically, woman's social role places her as the
object of the gaze, whether in after-dinner entertainment or
in fiction.^ Further evidence of intense interest in
voyeurism, appearances, and an elaborate system of
disciplinary practices for women can be found in Godey'
Lady's Book which was founded in 1830 and, by 1860, had a
,
readership of 150,000 that spanned class and geographic
boundaries. Godev' outsold "every other American magazine
of its day by three to one."" Godev's combined text with
images to perpetuate the ideology that called for women to
perform as the objects of male scopophilia, through both its
attention to and encouragement of female readers' concern
with fashion and appearance and through comments such as, in
1852, "It is a woman's business to be beautiful."^
Taking a larger perspective, Michel Foucault has argued
that a shift in the role of the visual came with the rise of
the modern era in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In The History of Sexuality. Volume 1 he claims that
the hysterization of women, which involved a thorough
medicalization of their bodies and their sex, was
carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed
to the health of their children, the solidity of the
family institution, and the safeguarding of society.
It was the reverse relationship that applied in the
case of birth controls and the psychiatrization of
perversions: here the intervention was regulatory in
nature, but it had to rely on the demand for individual
dsipesackiipnlgi,nesatantdhecojnusntcrtauirentsof(dthreess'abgoedsy'1.andBrothaedly
'population,' sex became a crucial target of a power
organized around the management of life rather than the
menace of death.®
3
In Discipline and Punish Foucault explicitly links these
.
"disciplines and constraints" to the gaze: "Discipline makes
possible the operation of a relational power that sustains
itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of
public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of
calculated gazes."’
Foucault's work has been tremendously important to a
feminist understanding of the gaze and its evolution as a
means of masculine domination of women. However, he has
been criticized for tending to ignore, with exceptions like
the passage cited above, the role that gender plays in
regimes of power, whether institutional, as in the prison or
the clinic, or "relational," as in the gaze. Furthermore,
as Lois McNay notes, "What Foucault's account of power does
not explain is how, even within the intensified process of
the hysterization of the female body, women did not simply
slip easily and passively into socially prescribed feminine
sexuality."® Psychoanalysis, here psychoanalysis-based
feminist film theory, can provide a useful counterbalance to
Foucault's work because of its emphasis on subjectivity.®
Before I turn to the theory, a brief look at
Hawthorne's sketch "The Canal Boat" (1835) will demonstrate
the workings of many of the concerns I will discuss in the
following five chapters: the gaze, with its potential for
dominance and resistance; other senses, with their threat of
excess and disruption; mirror relationships, with their
4
inherent acknowledgement of the other's relationship to the
self; coupling and clothing, with their dual promise of
intimacy and separation. In the Introduction and throughout
this study I will emphasize femininity as the ground on
which these questions are played out. However, Hawthorne's
narrators and my analyses call masculinity into question as
well. The narrator of "The Canal Boat" offers a fine first
look at the ways that Hawthorne constructs and then dissects
gendered subjectivities. First he focuses on femininity and
then on masculinity.
In this short sketch, a strange Englishman walks around
holding an "imaginary mirror" in which the passengers' and
the narrator's "faces would appear ugly and ridiculous, yet
still retain an undeniable likeness to the originals" (434).
The narrator takes the Englishman's activities as license
for his own gazing:
He lifted his eye-glass to inspect a Western lady, who
at once became aware of the glance, reddened, and
retired deeper into the female part of the cabin. Here
was the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of
America: shrinking when no evil was intended; and
sensitive like diseased flesh, that thrills if you but
point at it; and strangely modest, without confidence
in the modesty of other people; and admirably pure,
with such a quick apprehension of all impurity.
In this manner, I went all through the cabin, hitting
everybody as hard a lash as I could, and laying the
whole blame on the infernal Englishman. At length, I
caught the eyes of my own image in the looking-glass,
where a number of the party were likewise reflected,
and among them the Englishman, who, at that moment, was
intently observing myself. (435)
The narrator gazes at the woman through the lens of the
Englishman's apparently brief "glance," which completely
5
dominates her; she moves away from it into her proper
sphere, "deeper into the female part of the cabin."
The narrator affirms the fact that he describes a type:
"the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of
America." His treatment of the woman of America (embodied
by these four traits) immediately undermines itself and its
assumptions about femininity in a list of the ways that
these traits make her respond to someone, presumably a man
like the narrator. First, she shrinks even though he
intends no evil. Second, she expresses sensitivity even
though he has only pointed at her; here, however, he clearly
points to the association between femininity and corporeal
corruption that we will see throughout the stories. He
further complicates her response by using the ambiguous
"thrills," which often suggests a positive feeling of
excitement. Third, she feels modesty but does not credit
others with that sensibility. Fourth, she possesses purity,
—
but easily "apprehends" a verb which connotes both fear and
—
understanding impurity in her (male) counterpart.
The narrator immediately and abruptly follows this list
of the woman's characteristics with a peculiar statement of
his own violence. His "[i]n this manner" suggests that
either he has adopted the feminine position, a gesture we
will see often in the following chapters whether with
Wakefield, Giovanni, Aylmer, Feathertop, Hooper, or
Coverdale. Another reading which is less likely