The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction - Softcover

Pfister, Joel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804719489 ISBN 13: 9780804719483

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1991

Synopsis

This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's psychological themes, the author draws on the history of personal life to suggest that mid-century psychological fictions help, historically, to account for the surfacing of a bourgeois Freudian discourse later in the century. The production of Personal Life also asks why it was that women in mid-century fiction, especially that written by men, were represented as psychological targets of male monomaniacs in the home. By connecting the enforcement of middle-class 'feminine' roles to psychological tension between the sexes, Hawthorne's fiction at times implicitly critiques the sentimental construction of gender roles on which the economic and cultural ascendancy of his class relied.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“Pfister merges the best of both new historical and cultural studies in his treatment of the novels and the cultural ambivalence—about domesticity, motherhood, and the middle class—that Hawthorne’s career illustrates.”—Studies in Short Fiction
“A provocative yet sensible reading, a welcome contribution to debates on Hawthorne’s gender politics and to the new scholarship in domestic ideology.”—American Literature

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0804719489
• ISBN 13: 9780804719483
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 269