THE VEILED GAZE: VISION, INTIMACY, AND GENDERED SUBJECTIVITIES IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S FICTION By ANGELA KELSEY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1993 Copyright 1993 by Angela Kelsey TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iv INTRODUCTION 1 NOTES 16 CHAPTERS 1 MRS. WAKEFIELD'S GAZE 22 NOTES 45 2 SENSE INTERMIXTURE IN "RAPPACCINI 'S DAUGHTER" 47 NOTES 82 3 MIRROR, MIRROR: "THE BIRTH-MARK" AND "FEATHERTOP" 90 NOTES 126 4 "SELF-SHUDDERINGS" AND "THE WITCHERY OF DRESS" IN "THE MINISTER'S BLACK VEIL" AND "LADY ELEANORE'S MANTLE" 130 NOTES 175 5 THE GAZE, SELF-CONSTRUCTION, AND CASTRATION IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE 181 NOTES 2 27 WORKS CITED 231 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 239 iii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE VEILED GAZE: VISION, INTIMACY, AND GENDERED SUBJECTIVITIES IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S FICTION By Angela Kelsey December 1993 Chairperson: David Leverenz Major Department: English In the years 1830-1860, during which Hawthorne wrote most of his fiction, a variety of forces worked directly and indirectly to increase American society's interest in sight, voyeurism, appearances, and an elaborate system of disciplinary practices for women. In this study I argue that, particularly in his short fiction and The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne and his various male narrators play out his and his society's anxieties over vision, veiling, intimacy, and gendered subjectivities. The female characters I discuss here— in Chapter One, Mrs. Wakefield of "Wakefield"; in Chapter Two, Beatrice Rappaccini of "Rappaccini 's Daughter"; in Chapter Three, Georgiana of "The Birth-mark" and Mother Rigby of "Feathertop" ; in Chapter Four, Elizabeth of "The Minister's Black Veil" and Lady Eleanore of "Lady Eleanore's Mantle"; and in Chapter Five, Zenobia and Priscilla of The Blithedale Romance—represent a wide variety of responses to the gaze. IV As they and their actions define femininity or a feminine subject position for Hawthorne, that position shifts constantly. Male characters and narrators are similarly at odds with a shifting standard of masculinity. Hawthorne's male characters in the stories discussed in this study do not possess stable identities. Wakefield risks descending into oblivion after his attempt to own the gaze. By the end of "Rappaccini's Daughter," Giovanni's and Rappaccini's attempts to control femininity leave them "blasted." Aylmer's attempt at mastery of his wife and an always feminine Nature in "The Birth-mark" leaves his wife dead and him with another instance of failure to record in his folio. Reverend Hooper valiantly tries to escape the nakedness that he fears will come with intimacy with Elizabeth; his black veil, however, does not protect him from the contaminating monstrosity that he associates with femininity. And Coverdale, despite his attempts to fill himself with the details others hide, is reduced to a man alone with his material comforts. In all of these texts Hawthorne constructs and then dissects gendered subjectivities, both feminine and masculine. V INTRODUCTION During the years 1830-1860, a variety of forces worked directly and indirectly to increase American society's focus on women's bodies and their management. This era saw the rise of the cult of true womanhood and the doctrine of separate spheres for women and men; an increase in urban growth and class upheaval; and the growth of social reform movements, particularly abolition, feminism, temperance, anti-prostitution, and health and fashion reform. Historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued that this flux led to an increase in the degree of specificity of body maintenance and etiquette rules for women, many of which would be regulated by visual means, in the culture's attempt to maintain or restore social order. ^ Also during the years 1830-1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote most of his fiction. In this dissertation, I will argue that, particularly in his short fiction and The Blithedale Romance . Hawthorne and his various male narrators play out his society's anxieties concerning femininity, masculinity, and the new visual perspectives that worked to construct subjectivity. We can place Hawthorne's interest in voyeurism within the larger context of vision, voyeurism, and gazing, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century.^ 1 s s 2 More specifically, woman's social role places her as the object of the gaze, whether in after-dinner entertainment or in fiction.^ Further evidence of intense interest in voyeurism, appearances, and an elaborate system of disciplinary practices for women can be found in Godey' Lady's Book , which was founded in 1830 and, by 1860, had a readership of 150,000 that spanned class and geographic boundaries. Godev' outsold "every other American magazine of its day by three to one."" Godev 's combined text with images to perpetuate the ideology that called for women to perform as the objects of male scopophilia, through both its attention to and encouragement of female readers' concern with fashion and appearance and through comments such as, in 1852, "It is a woman's business to be beautiful."^ Taking a larger perspective, Michel Foucault has argued that a shift in the role of the visual came with the rise of the modern era in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In The History of Sexuality. Volume 1 he claims that the hysterization of women, which involved a thorough medicalization of their bodies and their sex, was carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the solidity of the family institution, and the safeguarding of society. It was the reverse relationship that applied in the case of birth controls and the psychiatrization of perversions: here the intervention was regulatory in nature, but it had to rely on the demand for individual disciplines and constraints ( dressages 1 . Broadly speaking, at the juncture of the 'body' and the 'population,' sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death.® 3 In Discipline and Punish . Foucault explicitly links these "disciplines and constraints" to the gaze: "Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes."’ Foucault's work has been tremendously important to a feminist understanding of the gaze and its evolution as a means of masculine domination of women. However, he has been criticized for tending to ignore, with exceptions like the passage cited above, the role that gender plays in regimes of power, whether institutional, as in the prison or the clinic, or "relational," as in the gaze. Furthermore, as Lois McNay notes, "What Foucault's account of power does not explain is how, even within the intensified process of the hysterization of the female body, women did not simply slip easily and passively into socially prescribed feminine sexuality."® Psychoanalysis, here psychoanalysis-based feminist film theory, can provide a useful counterbalance to Foucault's work because of its emphasis on subjectivity.® Before I turn to the theory, a brief look at Hawthorne's sketch "The Canal Boat" (1835) will demonstrate the workings of many of the concerns I will discuss in the following five chapters: the gaze, with its potential for dominance and resistance; other senses, with their threat of excess and disruption; mirror relationships, with their 4 inherent acknowledgement of the other's relationship to the self; coupling and clothing, with their dual promise of intimacy and separation. In the Introduction and throughout this study I will emphasize femininity as the ground on which these questions are played out. However, Hawthorne's narrators and my analyses call masculinity into question as well. The narrator of "The Canal Boat" offers a fine first look at the ways that Hawthorne constructs and then dissects gendered subjectivities. First he focuses on femininity and then on masculinity. In this short sketch, a strange Englishman walks around holding an "imaginary mirror" in which the passengers' and the narrator's "faces would appear ugly and ridiculous, yet still retain an undeniable likeness to the originals" (434). The narrator takes the Englishman's activities as license for his own gazing: He lifted his eye-glass to inspect a Western lady, who at once became aware of the glance, reddened, and retired deeper into the female part of the cabin. Here was the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of America: shrinking when no evil was intended; and sensitive like diseased flesh, that thrills if you but point at it; and strangely modest, without confidence in the modesty of other people; and admirably pure, with such a quick apprehension of all impurity. In this manner, I went all through the cabin, hitting everybody as hard a lash as I could, and laying the whole blame on the infernal Englishman. At length, I caught the eyes of my own image in the looking-glass, where a number of the party were likewise reflected, and among them the Englishman, who, at that moment, was intently observing myself. (435) The narrator gazes at the woman through the lens of the Englishman's apparently brief "glance," which completely 5 dominates her; she moves away from it into her proper sphere, "deeper into the female part of the cabin." The narrator affirms the fact that he describes a type: "the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of America." His treatment of the woman of America (embodied by these four traits) immediately undermines itself and its assumptions about femininity in a list of the ways that these traits make her respond to someone, presumably a man like the narrator.