Studies in American Fiction (2006) - In a Pig's Eye: Masculinity, Mastery, and the Returned Gaze of the Blithedale Romance
Details
- article: In a Pig's Eye: Masculinity, Mastery, and the Returned Gaze of the Blithedale Romance
- author(s): David Greven
- journal: Studies in American Fiction (2006)
- issue: volume 34, issue 2, pages 131-159
- journal ISSN: 0091-8083
- publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- keywords: 1800-1899, Alfred Hitchcock, American, American literature, Authors, Cary Grant, Competition, David Greven, English Literature, Gaze, Grace Kelly, Hamlet, James Stewart, Laura Mulvey, Lee Edelman, Literary criticism, London, England, Marion Crane, Masculinity, Nathaniel Hawthorne, New York City, New York, Nineteenth Century, Notorious (1946), Novel, Patricia Highsmith, Politics, Portrayals, Psycho (1960), Psychological aspects, Raymond Burr, Rear Window (1954), Richard Allen, Robert Samuels, Romance literature, Screen (1975) - Visual pleasure and narrative cinema, Sex roles, Susan White, The Blithedale Romance, Thelma Ritter, Voyeurism, Wendell Corey, Works
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Abstract
The young Ellen Langton stares at Fanshawe, the eponymous protagonist of Hawthorne's first novel, marvelling at his beauty; the Minister Hooper prevents anyone from seeing his face, hidden behind a black veil; Feathertop, believing he cuts a dashing figure, stares at himself in the mirror, discovering, to his horror, that he is merely the mirage of a man, a witch's illusion; Giovanni stares at lush, poisonous Beatrice Rappacini in her equally beautiful and deadly garden, little realizing that her father and Rappacini's own scientific rival, Baglioni, stares at Giovanni staring at her; Chillingworth triumphantly stares at the exposed flesh of sleeping, guilt-ridden Dimmesdale: these examples of the function of the gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne's work metonymically symbolize numerous important issues that inform his oeuvre. Yet his analysis of normative forms of masculinity-all of those asides about the essentially brutish natures and increasingly regularized bodies of men, not to mention the possibility that what Coverdale seeks is in fact Lacan's hairy athlete, along with Coverdale's uncanny confrontation with a terrifyingly otherized form of manhood in the peeping pigs, peeping back at him, tinged with the author's own anxieties about his gendered identity and how it was perceived-does provide an important critique of the construction of gender in Hawthorne's America.
