Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances - Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2021-12-01
Journal	Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
Authors	Ariel Clark Silver

Abstract

No serious study of psychoanalysis in the work of Hawthorne can sidestep the work of Frederick Crews in The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966), in which Crews explores the Oedipal complex at work in Hawthorne’s oeuvre, or the work of David Greven in The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender (2014), in which Greven considers the impact of Freudian and Lacanian literary theory on the construction of masculinity in Hawthorne through the myth of Narcissus rather than Oedipus. But David Diamond, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in clinical practice and professor of psychiatry, not only acknowledges the work of Crews, Greven, and others who have attempted to read Hawthorne through Freud, he challenges the conclusions at which they arrive. Crews himself challenged the thesis he advanced in The Sins of the Fathers, eventually retracting it, but not before it was widely disseminated. And because it came at the beginning of an era of critical disaffection with Freud, the argument was not taken up—either to expand or challenge it—until Greven reconsidered the approach afresh fifty years later.Even as Diamond acknowledges the “rhetorical agility” (11) of Greven’s cultural, biographical, and literary study, he suggests that the purpose and content of his own work are quite different. Where Greven is focused on “broad intellectual terrain” (12), Diamond positions his contribution as a telescopic investigation of the inner lives of Hawthorne’s five main protagonists—Dimmesdale, Hester, Holgrave, Zenobia, Miriam—in the tradition of the psychoanalytic method. Each of the five chapters in his monograph focuses on the unconscious crisis and transformation of one of these characters, beginning and ending with those in The Scarlet Letter (1850). This close reading of the text, informed by the work of Lionel Trilling and New Criticism, diverges from claims in the academic literature of the last half-century since the publication of Crews’s first foray into Freudian psychology in Hawthorne. Against prevailing judgments, Diamond contends that Dimmesdale does in fact change at the end, Holgrave does find happiness in Phoebe, Zenobia is in fact a radiant presence, Miriam has magnetic influence, and Hester acts as her own agent in returning to Boston. Responding to the literary critics that confess they cannot see what Hester saw, Diamond asks these readers to examine their own blindness rather than hers.Indeed, the art of how to read these romances is at the center of Diamond’s concern. While he disputes the findings of numerous, notable literary critics, he understands how they may have arrived at their conclusions. His hope is to shed light on the psychoanalytic process at work in the relationship between the author, the reader, and the characters. He wants to do more than touch on psychological themes or invoke Freudian theory. Rather, his purpose is to illuminate the clinical process of crisis and transformation that occurs as the protagonists in the major romances of Hawthorne encounter and contend with the unconscious.Diamond is driven in his analysis by the clinical understanding that a confrontation with an erupted unconscious—often incited by experience with death—is the site of crucial psychological transformation. In his view, Hawthorne is attuned to “The Haunted Mind,” in which occasionally “the receptacles are flung wide open” (306). But Diamond believes that Hawthorne hides these experiences of psychic explosion in narrative gaps that are shuttered from the reader’s view, in part to protect the emotional sanctity of his own characters as they work to resolve the tensions between the ego, the id, and the superego. Diamond deploys the psychoanalytic method to help bridge these narrative gaps so that “a coherent narrative, which accounts for the relationship of the unconscious to the protagonist’s transformation, can be credibly established… . Things of great significance happen to these characters in these gaps and their fine structure can be adduced and their meaning explored. The narration about them may stop but the characters’ psyches do not” (8).As the psychoanalytic method is applied to observation, inference, and finally interpretation of the narrative gaps, the reader is placed in the role of the analyst and the character in the role of the analysand. In order for the reader to succeed, they must approach the character clinically, rather than critically, acting within the parameters of neutrality, empathy, even attention, and attunement to countertransference. Diamond almost appeals directly to the reader of his work to read Hawthorne’s characters sympathetically. Only when a reader resists the demands of their own ego and attains an affinity with the character during these moments of “intense vulnerability” (10) can they see the suffering and apprehend some of the mysteries of the protagonist’s soul as it undergoes psychic transformation.Applying the clinical process to fictive characters is fraught with challenge. In fiction there is no therapeutic dialectic, that mutual construction between analyst and analysand that provides the best means of arriving at psychological truth. The lack of response from the character sometimes causes the reader, particularly the critical reader, to read the narrative gaps ironically rather than empathetically and to insert their own critical faculties, or ego, to fill the space. The absence of dialectic also causes the critical reader as analyst to search for their analysand in the author rather than the character. Unlike the character, the author is a living being with whom one may theoretically engage in such a mutual construction. These misalignments in the clinical relation may account for the problems in interpretation identified by Diamond. Literary critics who are not clinicians and do not seek a therapeutic end for their work have read the ellipses in the romantic texts with irony rather than empathy and have identified an analysand in the author (hence the many cultural, historical, and biographical readings of his work) rather than in the protagonists. As Diamond has sought to offer close psychological readings of the text, he has had to contend with “radically counter-textual readings” (15), the result of critics trying and, in his view, failing to understand psychoanalytic developments that are available only if one is willing to read clinically rather than critically.Diamond begins and ends his clinical reading of Hawthorne’s oeuvre with The Scarlet Letter, the most obviously psychological of his works, what F. O. Matthiessen called a novel of “psychological exactitude” (277). In the first chapter, which deals with Dimmesdale, and the last, which deals with Hester, Diamond makes his most complete and convincing case for the profound psychological transformations that Hawthorne inscribes in his texts, movements toward personal integration which can be perceived only when one chooses to read with clinical “empathetic immersion” (44) rather than critical irony. As if to underscore the importance of how we read, he makes clear the destruction that is wrought within the romance when characters read one another critically (Chillingworth “reading” Dimmesdale) and the salvation that is set in motion when characters read one another sympathetically (Hester “reading” Dimmesdale). Against the readings of many critics, Diamond suggests that both Dimmesdale and Hester achieve psychic reintegration through painful self-awareness allowing for a final alignment of intellect and emotion. The surprising elliptical developments at the end of their lives—revelation for Dimmesdale and return for Hester, which Diamond calls the “crowning development” (144) of the romance—are not aberrations in the plot. Instead, they are necessary and intrinsic to the transformations they achieve. Their unity, both within themselves and with each other, is marked finally in their burial together in Boston.In Diamond’s treatment of Holgrave, his contention that an encounter with death contributes to unconscious crisis and transformation becomes even more apparent. When Holgrave apprehends the bloodied body of Governor Pyncheon, the “entire weight of the history of the House of the Seven Gables is being brought into his contemplation” (67-68). During his unnarrated vigil, Holgrave must reckon with a diseased past even as he seeks to convert the traumatic experience of the Maules and the Pyncheons into a work of art, which he achieves through “the office of love” (71). It is his union with Phoebe that repairs the rupture that death brought between the real and the ideal; together they can cultivate a “multigenerational community bound by love and respect” (72) rather than retribution. The experience of therapy that benefitted an immediate family—Dimmesdale, Hester, and Pearl—expands outward in The House of the Seven Gables to encompass an extended family, even families, over time.Death also plays a central role in the experiences of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance and Miriam in The Marble Faun. Indeed, it is the death of Zenobia—what Diamond calls the “defining act” (78) of the romance—that produces crisis and transformation in others. The dark unrecorded interval at Eliot’s pulpit, where Zenobia must contend with betrayal, dispossession, corruption, and abandonment, leads to release from ignominy through suicide. But her death releases something else in her readers: moral outrage that society could combine so forcefully against the “womanhood represented so magnificently in Zenobia” (100). The male characters of Blithedale—Old Moodie, Hollingsworth, and Coverdale—are also made acutely aware of her “inestimable value” (100) through her tragic passing. They come to see that their skepticism has kept them from the sympathy she was prepared to offer them. In The Marble Faun, it is murder that psychologically transforms all four protagonists, but particularly Miriam, moving her from trauma to moral stature. The tragic dignity of her love and insight are purchased through “sacrifice and irredeemable loss” (110). The murder of the model changes Miriam entirely. All at once, she is freed from the childhood trauma of abuse, finds love in Donatello, who commits this violence on her behalf, and accepts the consequences of her collaboration in the loss of life. Her mature stance of mourning bespeaks her “magisterial integrity” (130) and the unity she achieves through her unflinching confrontation with death.Through such sympathetic clinical readings, Diamond seeks to rehabilitate not only our understanding of Dimmesdale, Hester, Holgrave, Zenobia, and Miriam, but Hawthorne himself, whose literary reputation has suffered immensely from what he sees as critical misreadings, like those of Gordon Hutner, who dismissed Hawthorne as damaged, anxious, inauthentic, and finally “irrelevant” (258) in “Whose Hawthorne?” (Millington 251-265). While this book may not be able to settle the Hawthorne culture wars, it strives to carefully unpack the difficult, unexpected, and salutary transformations made by each of Hawthorne’s romantic protagonists as they encounter and contend with the tragic crises of their unconscious experience. This empathetic approach allows Diamond to offer clear and striking interpretations that underscore the enduring relevance of Hawthorne’s work to all who yearn for resolution and liberation in the face of profound and often prolonged moral and spiritual conflicts.

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Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.47.2.0291

References

1941 - American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
2004 - The Cambridge Companion to Nathanial Hawthorne