Woman’s Veil and Male Gaze: Conflicts of Conventional and Unconventional Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
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This essay analyzes how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance responds to the new womanhood suggested by the women’s rights movement in nineteenth-century America. The novel is often misunderstood as a conservative work that conventionally typicalizes women into the two categories of the angelic and the evil and punishes the evil woman. However, this essay argues that the novel does not reiterate such a conventional attitude toward women, but rather it examines how the cult of true womanhood is constructed by patriarchal ideology and explores how the newly suggested womanhood conflicts with conventional womanhood. The novel deals with such critical points through the relationship between woman’s veil and male gaze on it. By putting the white veil, or the cult of true womanhood, on women, the patriarchal society maintains male supremacy over women. The Blithedale Romance particularly focuses on male intellectuals’ ambivalent reaction to the new womanhood through the narrator Coverdale: although he intellectually understands the power structure related to the conventional womanhood and has curiosity about the new one, he is still bound to the conventional ideas of women and thus constantly attempts to keep the unconventional woman Zenobia under his gaze. Coverdale’s attitude toward Zenobia illustrates male intellectuals’ anxiety over the advent of new ideas that may threaten the existing social order.
Abstract
This essay analyzes how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance responds to the new womanhood suggested by the women’s rights movement in nineteenth-century America. The novel is often misunderstood as a conservative work that conventionally typicalizes women into the two categories of the angelic and the evil and punishes the evil woman. However, this essay argues that the novel does not reiterate such a conventional attitude toward women, but rather it examines how the cult of true womanhood is constructed by patriarchal ideology and explores how the newly suggested womanhood conflicts with conventional womanhood. The novel deals with such critical points through the relationship between woman’s veil and male gaze on it. By putting the white veil, or the cult of true womanhood, on women, the patriarchal society maintains male supremacy over women. The Blithedale Romance particularly focuses on male intellectuals’ ambivalent reaction to the new womanhood through the narrator Coverdale: although he intellectually understands the power structure related to the conventional womanhood and has curiosity about the new one, he is still bound to the conventional ideas of women and thus constantly attempts to keep the unconventional woman Zenobia under his gaze. Coverdale’s attitude toward Zenobia illustrates male intellectuals’ anxiety over the advent of new ideas that may threaten the existing social order.
참고문헌 (9)
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- Clinton, Catherine, "The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century" (1999), Hill
- Gilbert, Katherine, "Two Nineteenth-Century Feminists: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Relationship with Margaret Fuller", PostScript, 13, pp.110~111 (1996)
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel, "The Blithedale Romance", pp.1996, Bedford
- Keyser, Elizabeth, "Veils and Masks; The Blithedale Romance and The Sacred Fount", The Henry James Review, 2(2), pp.11~110 (1981)
- Mulvey,Laura, "Visual and Other Pleasure" (1989), Indiana UP
- Orsagh, Jacqueline E, "Blithedale: Another Lesson for Dark Ladies", The Centennial Review, 31(3), pp.291~307 (1987)