Hawthorne, Gender, and Death: Christianity and Its Discontents [Paperback]

This book draws on a range of critical approaches, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, political justice theory, and feminist theory, to consider the ways that strategies of death denial and their compensatory consolations offer insight into the ethical, gender, and religious questions raised by Hawthorne's novels.Unholy Dying in The Scarlet Letter The Custom-House Sketch, The Secular Pilgrim, and The Happy Death Familial Immortality and the Dying of Death in The House of the Seven Gables From Melancholy to Mourning: Death and Politics in The Blithedale Romance Intimate Equality: Sacrifice and Death in The Marble Faun

Weldon explores the heretofore occulted connections between the violence Hawthone's male protagonists directed against women and their fears of psychic disintegration, mortality, and social annihilation. Weldon's persuasive elaborations of this claim enable her to demonstrate, quite convincingly in my estimation, how the denial of death constitutes a transcultural and even a v structure of masculinist self-construction. - Donald Pease, Avalon Chair of Humanities and Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College