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The Feminine Ancestral Footsteps: Symbolic Language THE FEMININE ANCESTRAL FOOTSTEPS: SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE BETWEEN WOMEN IN THE SCARLET LETTER AND THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES Gabriela Serrano, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2006 APPROVED: David Kesterson, Major Professor James Duban, Minor Professor Scott Simpkins, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English Sandra L. Terrell, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Serrano, Gabriela, The Feminine Ancestral Footsteps: Symbolic Language Between Women in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Doctor of Philosophy (English), December 2006, 145 pp., references, 47titles. This study examines Hawthorne’s use of symbols, particularly flowers, in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Romantic ideals stressed the full development of the selfreliant individual, and romantic writers such as Hawthorne believed the individual would fully develop not only spiritually, but also intellectually by taking instruction from the natural world. Hawthorne’s heroines reach their full potential as independent women in two steps: they first work together to defeat powerful patriarchies, and they then learn to read natural symbols to cultivate their artistic sensibilities which lead them to a full development of their intellect and spirituality. The focus of this study is Hawthorne’s narrative strategy; how the author uses symbols as a language his heroines use to communicate from one generation to the next. In The Scarlet Letter, for instance, the symbol of a rose connects three generations of feminine reformers, Ann Hutchinson, Hester Prynne, and Pearl. By the end of the novel, Pearl interprets a rose as a symbol of her maternal line, which links her back to Ann Hutchinson. Similarly in The House of the Seven Gables Alice, Hepzibah, and Phoebe Pyncheon are part of a family line of women who work together to overthrow the Pyncheon patriarchy. The youngest heroine, Phoebe, comes to an understanding of her great, great aunt Alice’s message from the posies her feminine ancestor plants in the Pyncheon garden. Through Phoebe’s interpretation of the flowers, she deciphers how the cultivation of a sense of artistic appreciation is essential to the progress of American culture. Copyright 2006 by Gabriela Serrano ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Dr. David Kesterson, my director and friend, is first on my list of acknowledgments for his patience and overall encouragement throughout the most difficult, yet rewarding time of my academic career thus far. It is not only his enthusiasm for Hawthorne studies but also his dedication to his students that have motivated me to learn as much as I possibly can in my field. I am grateful for all of his help, but mostly I genuinely feel privileged to have worked with such an influential name in Hawthorne scholarship. I also owe an enormous debt to Dr. James Duban for his perilous work editing this dissertation, and for helping me obtain a scholarship that made my work possible. His influence on me started when I took his graduate class, The Theological Origins of the American Renaissance, where I learned to view different scholarly perspectives as “tools” that would guide me toward developing my own ideas. I would also like to thank Dr. Scott Simpkins for his help at the beginning stages of this project. He guided me in the right direction among a sizable body of scholarship, specifically gender studies and narratology. In my personal life, there have also been people who have been my moral strength. Without the encouragement of my parents, Jose and Fidencia Serrano, my brother Victor Serrano, and—my most enthusiastic supporter—my sister, Blanca Serrano-Rivera, I would have found it impossible to even imagine a career in academia. I would also like to acknowledge Wade Walker for his countless efforts, specifically, for his technical support. Lastly, I came to realize how lucky we are as academics to love what we study so much that we will work under the worst of circumstances to contribute to our respective fields. My dear friend, Pearla Irene Marquez, showed me what it is to have a sincere passion for literature. iii We worked on our dissertations together last summer, and she would meet me at the library every day despite her severe illness. When she passed away at the end of the fall semester, I found it difficult to continue my work. Eventually, I remembered her sitting at a table relentlessly working on her studies in Shakespeare, and that image fueled my efforts to complete my dissertation. Pearla’s memory will be with me always. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................................iii INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1. NEW ENGLAND’S HATHORNES AND MANNINGS .................................. 14 2. HAWTHORNE’S NARRATIVE STRATEGIES AND SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE ...................................................................................................... 40 3. THE ROSE AND FEMININE REFORMERS IN THE SCARLET LETTER..... 70 4. POSIES, GHOSTS, AND ARTISTIC SENSIBILITY IN THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES ............................................................................................... 101 CONCLUSION......................................................................................................................... 132 WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................... 143 v INTRODUCTION During the nineteenth-century, many male authors at best created two-dimensional female characters in their novels, and at worst they failed to include feminine heroines at all. Nathaniel Hawthorne, however, created female characters that became legendary figures in American fiction because of his unique representation of women. The influence women have on their offspring in Hawthorne’s fiction is similar to the effect women had on his life. Hawthorne’s mother, wife, sisters and aunts had much to do with his success as a writer. Instead of having an oppressive effect on Hawthorne, these women inspired him. Similarly, women in Hawthorne’s fiction, such as Hester Prynne and Alice Pyncheon, have a major influence on the success of future generations of women in their families. What determines how a woman’s ancestors affect her has much to do with her perception of the female figures in her past. Hawthorne’s male ancestors, in particular his Puritan forefathers, have been the focus of much of Hawthorne scholarship—such as Frederick C. Crews’s and Edwin Haviland Miller’s studies. However, the women in Hawthorne’s family, particularly, the women from his maternal side of the family, the Mannings, are the basis of what are, arguably, the most distinguishable, dynamic characters in Hawthorne’s fiction. Although biographical, psychological, and historical studies focus on how readers interpret Hawthorne’s fiction, a study that evaluates his narrative strategies and artistic form will allow scholars to evaluate how characters within the text communicate with one another. After evaluating previous scholarship that centers on biography, psychology, and history, this study will consider the myth of women that Hawthorne creates in his fiction. In the last two chapters, this study will focus on the feminine myth in Hawthorne’s fiction, in particular how women communicate with one another beyond generational lines through symbols. Hester and Alice 1 Pyncheon, for example, are symbols; they are flowers and ghosts. Their descendants interpret the lives of these women by coming to an understanding of these symbols. The women in Hawthorne’s novels discover that when they interpret the meaning of these symbols, they develop an artistic sensibility. Furthermore, as the women learn to appreciate art, so does the author’s audience. Since the interpretation of symbols is a critical component of understanding art, Hawthorne, then, began to cultivate the American art of fiction one reader at a time by creating complex, mythical feminine figures in his novels. The setting for The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables is New England in the seventeenth and nineteenth-centuries, respectively. Michael Colacurcio’s “The Sense of an Author: The Familiar Life and Strange Imaginings of Nathaniel Hawthorne” and Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Office of The Scarlet Letter are invaluable studies since they examine how Hawthorne uses New England’s history, in particular its theology, in his narratives. Conflicting ideologies between seventeenth-century Calvinism and nineteenth-century Transcendentalism emerge throughout Hawthorne’s fiction, particularly in The Scarlet Letter. The narrator in this novel shifts between a seventeenth and nineteenth-century perspective. Although this shift may seem unaccountable, Hawthorne intended to create a narrator that would tell this story from two perspectives, as Colacurcio argues. This inaccuracy on the narrator’s part, as Colacurcio and Bercovitch conclude, is not a reflection of Hawthorne as a careless author. The aforementioned scholars focus on how Hawthorne makes his narrator appear unreliable to his audience, but Colacurcio and Bercovitch have only a reading audience in mind when they consider Hawthorne’s narrative strategy. I am not only concerned with how as a reader of Hawthorne’s fiction I interpret
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