Ambivalence in Hawthorne

Abstract

In this dissertation we provide three different perspectives on the nature of Ambivalence in a wide selection of works by the American 19th Century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Chapter 1 concerns itself with an exploration of gothic homes, emblems and characters in Hawthorne's main novels.We read the gothic from a histiographic and psychoanalytic perspective, suggesting that gothic elements come to function as the fearful seat of tensions that were at the forefront of 19th Century American society in its conflict ridden struggle for a distinct national identity. References are also made to post-colonial theory and systemic psychology in order to posit that the shadowy, ambivalent relations between characters, objects and places are reflective of the need to integrate a past of colonial abandonment and that the development of an American identity must in part be formed in relation to the British sense of national heritage.

If Chapter 1 was dedicated to the pitch black of the gothic, Chapter 2 is dedicated to an exploration of Mythological transformation and trancendence in a few selections of Hawthorne's short stories and novels, including an overview of his Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls.We conclude that, where Hawthorne's works are concerned, the notion of a singular unifying identity is questioned. Seeming to emulate Campbell's archetypal image of the journey, Hathorne's characters seem to be frozen in time, inhabiting the uncertain space between initiation and completion. In this view, Hawthorne's works seem to communicate a certain skepticism towards the attainment of a complete identity. The ambivalence of his texts comes to stand in for not only a national struggle, but of the frustrations of a universal humankind that is torn between an idealistic worldview and the disillusionment of reality.

The final chapter is a natural development of the previous two, in that it seeks to discuss ambivalence from a philosophical perspective. Rather than attempt to reduce ambivalent tensions to a specific opposition between differing values or worldviews, we now seek to provide a detailed reading of Hawthorne's ‘The Marble Faun’. We read the novel through a post-modern lens, attempting to read the text through Žižek's re-reading of Lacanian theory. As a result, Hawthorne’s ambivalent oscillation between blackness and whiteness, wholeness and fragmentation, gothic and myth is re-interpreted in terms of the choice between what Žižek dubs straight on or looking awry. ‘The Marble Faun’ appears to be a proto-postmodernist work in some respects, in that it allows readers to inhabit the text and experience, alongside the characters, two different ways of perceiving the world. The beauty of nature, the truth of revelation comes not simply in the futile struggle for a perfect world, the narcissistic projection of a utopia, but the self-aware adjustment of one’s gaze. Perhaps after all, the ideal was truly one and separate from the real.