Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David B. Diamond

Abstract

Reviewed by: Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David B. Diamond Jonathan A. Cook (bio) David B. Diamond, Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation Although the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for the acuity of its psychological insights, surprisingly few critical studies have addressed this topic beyond exploring the pervasive presence of the Puritan doctrine of original sin and its varied psychological sources and consequences. In The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966), Frederick Crews produced an influential study of Hawthorne’s fiction premised on the theory that unresolved Oedipal aggressions and repressed sexual drives suffused the author’s work—but the passage of time has revealed the reductive nature of many of Crews’s findings, even as the author formally renounced his embrace of Freudian models and expressed dissatisfaction with his own work in the 1989 reissue of his study. On a related front, biographical studies of the author with a psychological focus have sought to shed potential light on examples of aberrant behavior in his fiction, with Gloria C. Erlich in Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction (1984) raising the idea of Hawthorne’s possible physical abuse by his uncle, Robert Manning, and Philip Young in Hawthorne’s Secret (1984) pointing to the colonial history of incest in Hawthorne’s mother’s family, the Mannings, and suggesting the possibility of such intimacy between Hawthorne and his reclusive older sister Elizabeth. More recently, David Greven in The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud and the Politics of Gender (2012) combined Freudian and Lacanian insights with queer theory to critique Hawthorne’s representations of hegemonic manhood. Over the last few decades, Hawthorne’s writings have also been subject to a variety of ideological interventions that have threatened to diminish his status as an author. Only rarely do we find literary studies that, immune to critical fashion, substantially illuminate whole new swathes of the writer’s work. [End Page 816] With the appearance of David Diamond’s new psychoanalytic study of key factors of characterization in Hawthorne’s four major novels, Hawthorne criticism finally has an analysis that provides credible new psychological insights into key elements of the author’s four full-length romances. As a clinician who has spent decades teaching and overseeing the treatment of patients, Diamond brings his real-world experience to the realm of Hawthorne criticism with which he has long been engaged as reader and scholar. Diamond thus brings his psychoanalytic expertise to an interpretation of Hawthorne’s four major works of fiction, examining the characters of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables, Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, and Miriam in The Marble Faun. Largely eschewing professional jargon, Diamond frames his analyses with a basic paradigm of the psyche well suited to Hawthorne’s writings. As he explains in Chapter 1, Diamond takes as an interpretive model for his approach to Hawthorne’s fiction the early sketch “The Haunted Mind” (1835), postulating that the narrator’s late-night experience, between waking and dreaming, of the welling up of unconscious psychic materials provides a productive paradigm for a series of key scenes and characterizations in Hawthorne’s major fiction. As Hawthorne’s narrator writes, In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. (p. 306) Although the narrator goes on to denominate the upwelling of midnight phantoms in his mind as allegorical personifications of Passion, Feeling, Sorrow, Hope, Disappointment, Fatality, and Shame, Diamond interprets the experience as an episode of psychic disruption from the unconscious that offers the potential for personal transformation, both positive and negative. As he notes, [End Page 817] This confrontation with the unconscious is the site of a transformation which lies near each romance’s psychological, moral, and spiritual core. In addition, the figure of Death, the great teacher in all of Hawthorne’s romances...