Necro-filia, or Hawthorne’s Melancholia

Abstract

Might the Gothic be conceptualized not only as a fictional field or thematics, but also as a poetics, a tropology? And, furthermore, might the dominant figures of Gothic narrative accrue, or invite, a particular psychoanalytics? Hawthorne is a useful site for such questions: while deconstructive historiography has long understood Hawthorne’s lesson that historical reconstruction is an allegory of reading, little attention has been paid to his obsessively recurring figures. Hawthorne’s tendency to represent historiography as exhumation and historical desire as motivated by shadows marks his Gothic turn — one that has important implications for the discourses of national loss in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. While such loss has a distinct cultural specificity, it is broadly resonant with the nineteenth-century invention of melancholia that surfaces, conceptually, in Freud. Like the Freudian case history, the American Gothic tale is predicated upon certain tropes or rhetorical forms that are haunted by various kinds of loss, including referential loss; these tropes include prosopopoeia, catechresis, chiasmus, and allegory.