Nathaniel Hawthorne

This study analyzes the language used in the construction of the personal identity of Dr. Heidegger through the labels attached to him, both given by self and by others, and his stance-taking. The researcher applies Discourse Analysis to analyze the main character's utterances. The researcher also uses Indexicality Principle by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) as a mechanism to analyze identity. The qualitative content analysis is used to analyze thoroughly and interpret text data to draw inference towards the utterances on the short story. The result of the study shows that Dr. Heidegger is labeled mostly with negative words by others, however, he responded to combat these labels by using re-appropriation or by revaluing the existing labels. Moreover, the stances taken by Dr. Heidegger are found to position himself among others. Together with the labels given by self and others, and his interlocutor(s) in his talk-in-interactions the findings reveal that he is a strange old man, who is very curious and knowledgeable. Lastly, the conclusion can also be drawn that language and discourse are central to the construction of identities that are not always determined by a person himself, but also bound up with how others perceive him.

This study analyzes the language used in the construction of the personal identity of Dr. Heidegger through the labels attached to him, both given by self and by others, and his stancetaking. The researcher applies Discourse Analysis to analyze the main character’s utterances. In addition, the researcher also uses Indexicality Principle by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) as a mechanism to analyze identity. Qualitative content analysis is used to analyze thoroughly and interpret text data to draw inference towards the utterances on the short story.  The result of the study show that Dr. Heidegger is labeled mostly with negative words by others, however, he responded to combat these labels by using re-appropriation or by revaluing the existing labels. Moreover, the stances taken by Dr. Heidegger are found to position himself among others. Together with the labels given by self and others, and his interlocutor(s) in his talk-in-interactions the findings reveal that the he is a strange old man...

Wakefield, un hombre cansado de su cotidianidad, de su rutina, decide abrirse paso por un camino oscuro y turbulento llamado soledad, abandona su casa, a su esposa y se muda a unas cuantas calles de ella, desde allí, pasa las horas, días, meses y años, esperando que su ausencia trascienda más allá, se note, pero en realidad, un mutismo casi enternecedor se sienta sobre la casa Wakefield, un letargo que solo se ve alterado por la intempestiva reaparición del señor Wakefield años después...

Attached are a Table of Contents and a downloadable link for The VOICE of the CHILD in American Literature, written by MARY JANE HURST and published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1990.  The first book-length study of the child figure in American fiction, The Voice of the Child was a finalist for the Children’s Literature Association’s annual book award.

Table of contents:

Remerciements
Avant-propos
Introduction. Réfléchir (sur) la sensation (Lucie Lagardère, Anne-Laure de Meyer, Marina Poisson)
PREMIÈRE PARTIE : PHILOSOPHIE ET ART
Chapitre 1.
La couleur : de la sensation à la création. Turner et Locke. (Maxime Chapuis)
Chapitre 2.
Regards croisés entre Hume et Bramante : la sensation humienne face au Christ à la colonne. (Florence D'Aupias d'Alcochète)
DEUXIÈME PARTIE : HISTOIRE ET REPRÉSENTATION
Chapitre 3.
La sensation comme outil politique : les représentations anglaises de l'exécution de Charles Ier au XVIIe siècle (Anne-Laure de Meyer)
TROISIÈME PARTIE : LITTÉRATURE ET CRÉATION
Chapitre 4.
Feeling et construction imaginative chez S.T. Coleridge. (Lucie Lagardère)
Chapitre 5.
La sensation dans The Scarlet Letter : de l'oppression du sujet à la création libératrice. (Marina Poisson)
Chapitre 6.
Le dérèglement des sens dans Naked Lunch de William S. Burroughs. (Edouard Marsoin)

This definitive and complete Annotated Version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story of "Young Goodman Brown" contains 114 Footnotes, 1 Old Norse translation and 9 EndNotes. History is unpacked as to the numerous references to the Salem Witch Trials. (19 pp.)

In “The Blithedale Romance,” Nathaniel Hawthorne probes his characters’ benevolence and tolerance as well as sympathy, motives underpinning the enterprises of philanthropy and reform. These motives are also part of a long-standing international discourse about comic laughter, humorous characters, and proper satire, a backdrop of theorizing that began in early eighteenth-century England, theorizing that finds its American apotheosis in Washington Irving’s narrator for “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” Hawthorne reinscribes this discourse, its philosophical debate and literary presentation, to stage an examination of the motives for philanthropic reform. Hawthorne constructs his unreliable narrator Miles Coverdale as a failed humorist of a particular sort, one whose humor is marked by the good-natured amiability of a proper gentleman who observes and sketches what he sees for the edification of the reader, as Irving’s narrator does. In effect, Coverdale travesties and becomes a failed substitute Geoffrey Crayon.

Stigmatic analysis of the novel of N. Hawthorne which offers a new view with the concept of stigma which is treated in it like a real thing, a sign of the devil which marks impure persons like the heroin an adultress with a Scarlett letter - A..

This article will discuss novelist Andrew Sinclair's unpublished version of "The Scarlet Letter" (1972). It shows how Sinclair�s version reinterprets the idea of the Fall to demonstrate how the Puritans failed to create a city on a Hill, purified and distinct from the secular society in Britain. Sinclair's version of The Scarlet Letter emphasizes this notion of decline in newly-created witchcraft scenes involving Mistress Hibbins that underline how far the Puritans have deviated from the path of progress, both economic and spiritual. In the second part of this article I discuss how Sinclair creates other sequences of sex and sorcery that recall other British films of the period such as The Devil Rides Out (1968) and The Nightcomers (1971). Such moments took advantage of the more relaxed climate of censorship prevailing at that time (a new category of �X� films had been created in Britain in 1967, designed specifically for over-18 year olds), as well as giving Sinclair the chance to address feminist issues characteristic of late 1960s Britain as Hester and her fellow-Puritan women seek to forge lives on their own. This version of The Scarlet Letter captured the mood of a period when women enjoyed a greater freedom to determine their sexual lives, while polemics such as Germaine Greer�s The Female Eunuch (1970) offered visions of a future in which the family, marriage or even the presence of men no longer seemed significant.

In the wellspring of classic nineteenth-century American literature, a spectacular theme unites our greatest authors. They, in various ways, challenge the naïve optimism of the “American Adam” and American liberalism. They are deeply conservative in their skepticism toward human and civilizational progress and perfection.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birth-mark" has been interpreted as a story about the duality of human existence, the preference for an idea over a human life, male fears of menstruation and/or female sexuality, the murder of a wife without legal consequences, and even nineteenth-century labor conditions and practices. Despite the striking diversity of these readings, they all agree on one key point: the obsessive nature of Aylmer's reaction to the small crimson mark on Georgiana's otherwise white cheek. Hawthorne's decision to make a birthmark the focus of his story merits careful consideration. In some of his best-known fiction, Hawthorne depicts characters who are separated from other people because particular aspects of their appearance make them unusual. To cite two examples, The Reverend Mr. Hooper in "The Minister's Black Veil" creates an unbridgeable gulf between himself and his congregation by donning a simple piece of black crepe; similarly, in The Scarlet Letter, the Puritan elders decree that Hester Prynne must wear a red A on her breast as a reminder to herself and the community of her sin of adultery. Like Mr. Hooper's veil and Hester's embroidered letter, the small, crimson nevus in the shape of a human hand on Georgiana's face elicits a wide variety of reactions and symbolic interpretations from those who see it. What makes the birthmark noteworthy is that it is not something artificial a person chooses or is forced to wear; rather, it is a permanent part of Georgiana's physiology. Attributable to "an overgrowth of blood vessels," as one encyclopedia puts it, the birthmark on her face is directly connected to Georgiana's blood and all of the significance attached to that word, especially during the antebellum period ("Birthmark").

In the dark world that is set by Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Young Goodman Brown,” there is a tiny spark of hope that makes the reader believe in a way out of all the freakiness that Youngman Brown goes through in the woods of a good Christian’s nightmare, at least until the story nears the end. The good-hearted and loving wife of Goodman, Faith with her pink ribbons, stands for what may be regarded as the main issue of the town’s people.

<TXT>In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne uses Rome to develop his final critique of a transcendental American pantheism he associates with Catholicism--what he considers two correlative threats to a distinct Puritan/Protestant American identity. But Hawthorne's final published novel is as concerned with its own narrative displacement, its recursive trajectory from Rome to New England, as it is with its ostensible subject of old world decadence. In Rome, Hawthorne locates a genuine historical palimpsest, and now surrogate for New England, to describe a deification of nature initially indistinguishable from, but finally preferable to, Catholicism. Hawthorne uses one city on a hill (or hills) to critique another; Catholicism serves as a malleable feint for pantheism, its predecessor in Italy and successor in America.

In answering the question "Why teach literature?", Elaine Showalter says that the purpose(s) behind teaching literature vary according to class objectives, teachers' objectives, and the overview of the course (24). The author of Teaching Literature says that the purposes may be political, philosophical, moral, pedagogical, or just for pleasure. Thus, setting the objectives behind a course or a lesson is an essential starting point that draws the structure and the form that the class will take in the coming time. Whether the teacher wants her or his students to either build an understanding of the themes of a literary work, or to read just for the sake of pleasure, objectives do govern the teachers' whole plan. In answering the exact same question on "Why teach literature?" Beach et. al. say that the purpose behind teaching literature governs the choice of literary text and course textbooks, the evaluation of the students, what teaching method will the teacher use, and "how the [teacher] will foster student participation [. . .] in the classroom" (5). It can be deduced then that the relation between the purpose or the objective of the course or class and the employed teaching methods along with the evaluation and the choice of texts is a complementary one. Based on the information that have preceded, this paper will discuss planning a timeline and a methodology for teaching Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter for an assumed high school class. The plan will focus on the methodology of teaching, the timeline of the course, the material used, the evaluation form, the activities, and the assignments.

This paper sets off from the scholarly discussion around the concept of autonomy in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Its famous protagonist, Hester Prynne, strikes modern readers as a champion of self-sufficiency and heroic non-conformism, although the author denies any substantial reward to her self-assertion; Hester is doomed to live the rest of her existence as an outcast, and even worse, as someone who deems herself as such. The argument developed here is triggered by the fact that Hester is unable to transform autonomous agency into a fulfilling identity, and then finds in the author's later novel, The Blithedale Romance, a complementary approach to the paradoxical character of the Hawthornian self.

1692 yılında Salem Cadı Mahkemelerinde yargıç olarak görev yapan John Hathorne'un torunu olan Hawthorne geçmişine bağlı biri olsa da, aslında ondan kaçmaya da çalışmıştı. Orijinal soyadı olan Hathorne'u Hawthorne'a çevirmişti ve bunun nedeni olarak da dedesinin hakimlik yaparken bir sürü kadının cadı diye idam edilmesine karar vermesi gösterilir. 1 İşte böyle bir geçmişten gelen N.Hawthorn'un öykülerinden çoğu Püriten New England'da geçer ve en önemli romanı olan "The Scarlet Lettter,1850" Puriten Amerikanın klasikleşmiş bir tanımlaması haline gelmişse de çalışmamıza konu olan eser, yazarın aynı eksende kaleme aldığı Young Goodman Brown 2 adlı kısa hikayesidir.

Abstract in italiano: In questa lettura degli Occhiali d'oro, centrata sulla sua dimensione storico-politica e intertestuale, un'attenzione particolare, accanto a 'La civiltà cristiana' e a padre Gemelli, a Morte a Venezia di Thomas Mann e a Rappaccini's Daughter di Hawthorne, è data all'ipotesto sofocleo, rappresentato dal Filottete

Résumé en français: Cette lecture des Lunettes d'or de Bassani, centrée sur ses dimensions politiques et intertextuelles, consacre une attention particulière non seulement à 'La civiltà cristiana', à 'Mort à Venise' de Thomas Mann et à la nouvelle de Hawthorne 'Rappaccini's Daughter' mais aussi à l'hypotexte ancien représenté par le 'Philoctète' de Sophocle.

In 1839, after a long chain of dead-end jobs necessitated by his outwardly prosperous but privately profligate father’s debt-ridden death seven years earlier, the 19-year-old Herman Melville did what many other disaffected and adventurous young men had done before him and ran away to sea. He signed aboard the merchantman St. Lawrence as a ship’s boy (the lowest ‘green hand’ rank), for a round trip from New York to the then vast trading port of Liverpool. Returning to New York in the autumn, he took a teaching position but left after one term because he never received any wages. After a trip up the Ohio River in an unsuccessful quest for employment and inspired by Richard Henry Dana’s nautical memoir Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Jeremiah N. Reynolds’ 1839 article ‘Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific’ in the Knickerbocker magazine, Melville headed for New Bedford, Massachusetts, the ‘Whaling City’. There, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet, again as a ‘green hand’, for a 1/175th share of the profits, setting sail at the beginning of January 1841. 

It was the custom of whaling vessels to ‘gam’ if their paths crossed in the open ocean, meaning that the captains and first mates would meet for drinks and to share intelligence on the movements of whales, while the crews also got together and swapped stories. The Acushnet regularly gammed with the Lima from Nantucket, whose company included William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, who had been the first mate on the whaler Essex, sunk by an abnormally large sperm whale approximately 2,000 nautical miles west of South America in 1820:

I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed of around 24 knots, and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.

Chase had survived the appalling aftermath of the wreck, when the ship’s 20-man crew had spent three months at sea in three leaky whaling boats, eventually resorting to cannibalism, with survivors drawing lots to see who would be sacrificed and who would kill them after the corpses of the men who died of exposure ran out. (In another macabre twist, one boat carrying three men became separated from the group. It was found years later washed up on Ducie Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Islands, the skeletons of the crew still onboard.) Chase wrote an account of the ill-fated voyage in 1821, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, after which he returned to sea for another 19 years. Despite a distinguished seafaring career which saw him captain first the whaler Winslow and then his own ship, the Charles Carrol, Chase was haunted by his experiences. He spent eight years in an asylum after retiring, and when he died in Nantucket in 1869, he was found to have been hiding food in his attic. William lent Melville a copy of his father’s book, of which he would later write: ‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.’

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter deals with the Puritan Boston and the treatment of the sin of adultery in that socio-cultural context. The aim of this paper is to explicate how Hester and her daughter Pearl are punished for their connection to the sin, with Hester being an active participant in, and Pearl the product of an illicit relationship. To do this, the paper first establishes how the Puritan colonies dealt with adultery and then looks at the representation of it in the novel. The external and internal aspects of punishment of Hester and Pearl are then analyzed.

This complete publication is posted on Academia.Edu courtesy of Living Time™ Media International until 31st December 2019. This anthology of stories includes ten unabridged tales based around the themes of Love and Immortality. The ten authors featuring in this collection are: Leonid Andreyev, Guy de Maupassant, Lafcadio Hearn, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Count Leo Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Honoré de Balzac and Edouard d'Araille. The stories attempt to cover many aspects of love: the romantic, the playful, the erotic, the platonic, the bestial, the religious and the eternal - though this list may not be complete. It is an eclectic gathering of stories and it is unlikely that any one reader will be equally interested in all of its stories. This publication is introduced by a brief introduction by Alderson Smith, Head of Publishing for LTMI™. This book will no longer be available to download in its complete form after 31st December 2019 but a sampler version of it will then be available.

Puritan America represented itself as moral rectitude, while its anointed ministers-moral authorities-were living a life of debauchery. Stubbing at this self-image of rectitude-I'm holier than thou art attitude-, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter paints an awful picture of Dimmesdale, the celebrated minister in the Puritan environment and thereby posing the problem of consciousness and responsibility. Reading the above novel with the Freudian psychoanalysis, this essay uncovers the concatenation between conscience and responsibility in Dimmesdale's hypocritical attitude.

In literary works, it is observed that female bodies are endangered because of their male counterparts’ obsession with perfection. This is what we see in Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark” and Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess”. Though both the literary works are from different genre, these works share a common theme where the female figures are the subjects of their husband’s obsession and embracing death as the consequence of obsession. Nathaniel Hawthorne is an American author of 19th century who has incorporated the theme of obsession in his short story “The Birthmark” and showed how Aylmer’s obsession with perfection in physical beauty ultimately causes Georgiana’s death. On the other hand, Browning is a Victorian poet who has demonstrated the endangerment of female figure and marital violence during Victorian era toward the Duchess due to the Duke’s obsession with reputation and possessiveness in “My Last Duchess”.
In my paper, I will discuss the theme of obsession and how female bodies are endangered due to their male counterparts’ obsession in Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” and Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. Additionally, I will have psychoanalytic and feminism study to discuss the psyche of Aylmer and the Duke as well as to understand the inferior position of Georgiana and the Duchess.

"Ruth Hall" by Fanny Fern is different from other novels written by and addressed to women: its plot, protagonist, and style prove that Fern’s book is an unconventional female Bildungsroman. To prove this statement, this paper will compare Fern’s novel to the two most famous bestsellers of the period: "The Wide, Wide World" by Susan Warner and "The Lamplighter" by Maria Cummins.

“Hansel and Gretel” is not only one of the brothers Grimm’s most famous tales, but has been used for educational purposes since its publication in 1812. During the 19th century, the Grimm’s Children and Household Tales even were, together with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the two most widely read books after the Bible in the Anglo-American area. Consequently, the tale(s) have influenced the works of many authors ever since.
Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown”, it can be assumed that he was one of those authors since there are striking similarities in structure, content and symbolism between his allegorical story about 17th century Puritan society and the Grimm brothers’ tale. In both works from German, respectively American, (dark) Romanticism, the protagonists go on a journey on which they undergo a learning process through a test of their belief and their ability to differentiate between right and wrong. This procedure has in both tales the traditional structure of departure – journey – return, with the protagonist departing from civilization and a journey through uncivilized territory – a forest – until the return to society follows which they now experience differently.
Analyzing these previously disregarded parallels, this paper does not only suggest a possible influence on Hawthorne’s childhood education, but offers a new reading of a classic American short story as it discusses the journey of initiation Young Goodman Brown has to undergo in connection to a fairytale, a parallel which also opens up new perspectives on Hawthorne’s treatment of the American nation’s ‘childhood’ in one of his most famous stories.

Theocratic  communities  often  provide  an  atmosphere  for  injustice  against  individuals, especially  women.  This dissertation examines  the  relationship  between  dogmatic  theocracies, and  oppressed  women  in  two  distinct  theocratic  settings;  17 and  19 th th century  Puritan  New  England, century  Afghan  Taliban.  For  this  purpose,  the  selected  case  stud protagonists,  Hester  and  Mariam,  of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne’s ies  are  the  female The  Scarlet  Letter ,  and  Khaled Hosseini’s A  Thousand  Splendid Suns respectively. Case  studies  were  studied  according  to  a set  of  agency  and  passivity  devices  based  on  textual  evid ence.  In  particular,  feminist  stylistics was  the  key  theory  in  such  study  that  utilized  both  quantitative  and  qualitative  data  analyses. A nalyses  obtained  from  the  inspection  of  authors’  syntactic  choices  have  shown  that  female protagonists  were  primarily silenced  and  deprived  from  their  power  by  passivity  devices, albeit  the  use  of  certain  agency  devices.  Thus,  these  grammatical  choices  served  to  confirm the  existence  of  a  link  between  women’s  passivized  existence  and  their  lives  in  extremist theocratic  societies.
Keywords: The  Scarlet  Letter,  A  Thousand  Splendid  Suns theocracy.  , passivity,  feminist  stylistics,

One of clearest strands running through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction is a reflexive concern with its own capacities and limitations as a medium. The author’s 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse, for instance, often reads like an ars poetica: such stories as “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” and “The Birthmark” all take as their principal subject the feasibility of the artistic endeavor, and the materials necessary for its success. Yet unlike his contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, who outlined a creative process in “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle,” Hawthorne had little interest in philosophizing parallel to his literature. The critic is therefore left without any formulation of his aesthetic ideas with which to sort out the questions raised by his fiction, and so the picture left of Hawthorne’s understanding of his medium is “full of apparent ambiguities and self-contradictions” (Gupta 310). To educe any coherent system of aesthetics from his literary works, then, “one has also somehow to clear the obscurities and remove or explain away the contradictions” (310) that abound between them. The project of this essay will be to resolve one such contradiction between “The Artist of the Beautiful” and “The Birthmark,” with the aim of unifying, in part, Hawthorne’s scattered aesthetics. Specifically, one intuits the success of the artist in the former story and his failure in the latter, but they seem to achieve much the same end: both apprehend, if but momentarily, the “immortal essence” (“The Birthmark” 130) of beauty in their works. My question is therefore—does this tension indicate a discrepancy in Hawthorne’s aesthetic vision? If not, what is the error the protagonist of “The Birthmark” commits, and what does it reveal about Hawthorne’s theory of art?

Sample chapter of Drescher: Poets of Protest: Mythological Resignification in American Antebellum and German Vormärz Literature (2017).
The study  analyzes national mythologies in American and German literature. It focuses on processes of mythological resignification, a literary phenomenon carrying significant implications for questions of identity, democracy, and nationalism in Europe and America. Precise narratological analyses are paired with detailed, transnational readings of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Gutzkow's Wally, die Zweiflerin, Brown's Clotel, and Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. The study marries literature, mythology, and politics and contributes to the study of American and German literature at large.

http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-3745-8/poets-of-protest?c=66

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poets-of-protest/9783837637458

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne contrasts the miasma of puritanical repression that occupied mid-seventeenth century New England to the idea that nature is a safe haven from the sanctimonious judgement of public opinion.
From the very beginning of the book of Hester’s story, the colony is represented as place of oppression and punishment, as can be evidenced by the fact that the very first chapter of the actual story focuses on the description of the town’s prison. The significance of opening the book with such an image cannot be sufficiently underscored: in the first place, the prison stands in direct contrast to the idea that the colonists fled towards the New World in search for freedom, which is a point that the author himself emphasises:

Beginning in the early 19th century following the revolutionary victory over the British Empire to once and for all establish a free nation for all Americans to live, govern and dream, literary imaginations flowed freely like the dreams of their newly-minted American citizens. Then, as new lands west of the Mississippi River were opened to settlers hoping to reach the shores of the Pacific Ocean and the promised land of California, the motivational cry of Manifest Destiny awakened the senses and allowed the American Romanticism movement to flourish.

This new literary movement sought to encapsulate the nation's bountiful natural beauty and grandeur; the citizen's hard-fought right to freedom through democracy that led to the power of individualism; the trials and tribulations that all were personally experienced would be conveyed through heart-wrenching emotion; and the liberty to dream and facilitate a new life in a wondrous land would permeate through the imaginations of these literary geniuses.

In this course, our authors-have all contributed in their own unique way in the styles of Nature, Individualism, Emotion, and Imagination (Democracy and Freedom). We will discuss how our five authors embraced the myriad facets that encompass the American Romantic literary genre and how their unforgettable prose still resounds today.

Gothic narratives tend to privilege one particular subject above all others: women’s entrapment in domestic architectural spaces. This thesis aims to investigate the relationship
between women and the home by means of chronotope theory, phenomenology and the concept of the uncanny in three classic New England Gothic works: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The House of the Seven Gables, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. By viewing the chronotope of the Gothic home as the organising device for heroine-centred Gothic literature, this thesis ultimately makes a case for the view that time and space can be used for subversive feminist purposes in Gothic fiction by calling attention to patriarchal power structures in the home.

This article considers the figure of Hester from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and its adaptation to contemporary African American and Irish dramatic writing. It focuses on In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2001) by African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, as well as Irish dramatist Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998). These theatre-makers consciously manipulate The Scarlet Letter in that each Hester figure is a racially different and already marginalized woman who goes on to murder her child. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I argue that Parks and Carr combine complex and overlapping processes of adaptation to expose the slippery relationship between signification and affect, and to reveal how affective economies shape and control racial and gendered bodies as well as their movements in space. In doing so, these dramatists call into question accepted conventions of judgement, justice and morality. Through processes of domestication, recontextualization and actualization, Parks and Carr engage complexly with hotly debated issues within their individual national contexts and in the wider, western milieu that they share.