Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne's Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David Diamond

Abstract

Reviewed by: Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne's Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David Diamond Magnus Ullén David Diamond. Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne's Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation. Routledge, 2021. 191 + x pp. £120.00 (hardback). In contemporary Hawthorne criticism "[c]lose reading and psychoanalysis are not in favor," David Diamond notes in the introduction to his own refreshingly unapologetic attempt to provide a Freudian reading of Hawthorne's four major romances. While fully aware that "a psychoanalytic investigation of a fictional character is a perilous matter" (10), Diamond nevertheless insists that a Freudian reading, carefully performed, can "bring the reader back to the texts that Hawthorne wrote and draw attention to the urgent moral and spiritual conflicts that envelop the protagonists, conflicts that underpin all movement toward human liberation" (17). Unlike the famous Freudian reading by Frederick Crews (1966), Diamond seeks to diagnose not Hawthorne himself, but his characters. He stresses that he approaches the texts as a practicing psychoanalyst rather than a literary scholar and is careful to hedge his claims accordingly. Even so, his explicitly recuperative aim suggests he is also keen to present his own mode of reading as something of an antidote to much recent Hawthorne criticism. This makes for an engaging study that thrives on its ardent engagement with Hawthorne's texts, even if it does not always convince. Diamond focuses exclusively on the four canonical romances, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. References to the tales and sketches are few and in passing, with the exception of a passage from the 1835 sketch "The Haunted Mind," which is repeatedly advanced as proof that Hawthorne prefigures Freud: "In the depths of every heart, is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and 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" (Hawthorne 9: 306). [End Page E-1] According to Diamond, Hawthorne in this passage "drafts the broad outline of what would be central aspects of the Freudian topographic system set forth in The Ego and the Id: the division of the psychic territory of the id, and superego, and the mediating function of the ego" (4). He identifies, in each of the romances, a moment that repeats this early depiction of how "the hidden contents of the haunted mind may flood into consciousness" (23): this is "what Dimmesdale experiences in the aftermath of his encounter with Hester in the forest" (23); it is "what Holgrave experiences in his hour-long vigil with Jaffrey Pyncheon's corpse" (51); it is what Zenobia suffers when losing her "fortune and prospects for love" (82); and it is what makes Miriam signal to Donatello to kill the Model (110–11). In all cases, Diamond starts out from this scene when the unconscious is momentarily let loose, in order "to elucidate the dynamics of this critical moment and the transformation that result from it" (111). The first thing to notice about this approach is that it seems much less dependent upon psychoanalytic theory than Diamond lets on. One can disagree with Freud (or Diamond's understanding of Freud) and still find his discussion of the structural pattern he identifies rewarding. Diamond persuasively argues that critics have tended to overlook to what extent Hester's development in The Scarlet Letter is aided rather than impeded by Dimmesdale's actions. He believes that The House of the Seven Gables truly has a happy ending and that Coverdale, despite his protestations to the contrary, was never in love with Priscilla but with Zenobia. And he holds, finally, that The Marble Faun does not end "with the defeat of romance but by asserting its unique power to effect and transform" and that "there is every reason to believe that as an artist [Hilda] will fulfill the potential that the narrator finds in her" (135). Whatever we make of these judgments (I personally find myself agreeing and disagreeing in about equal measures), many readers will no doubt take delight in the...