Unveiling a Lady?: Hawthorne and the “Scribbling Women”

초록

This paper aims to explore how Nathaniel Hawthorne's reaction to his contemporary women writers illuminates the cultural and literary scene of mid-ninteenth-century America, and how Hawthorne and the "scribbling women" functioned as cultural performers in the same literary scene. Hawthorne has often been claimed to have a hostile attitude toward women writers, particularly in view of his derogatory remark on the "damned mob of scribbling women." However, considering that he also praised some of these "scribbling women," it can be argued that his attitude toward these women writers was ambivalent. In fact, Hawthorne's response to these scribblers unwittingly provides a useful basis for a revisionary discussion of the literary scene of mid-nineteenth-century America. In various sources, Hawthorne persistently emphasizes that women writers reveal or unveil their most private part of life beyond women's role prescribed by domestic ideology of his day. In this regard, the image of the Veiled Lady, which constitutes a central motif in The Blithedale Romance, can be argued to show the crux of Hawthorne’s conceptualization of the “scribbling women.” The Veiled Lady represents the paradoxical position of women writers: on the one hand, she symbolizes women controlled by domestic ideology, but on the other hand, she herself embodies woman’s participation in the public realm. The literary works by Hawthorne and women writers were produced by the cultural situation in which they in common had to struggle with the questions of how to represent the concerns proposed by domestic ideology and how to appeal to the growing reading public. As a result, Hawthorne’s response to the changes in the literary marketplace is well exemplified by the forced ending of The House of the Seven Gables which can be read as one in a domestic novel. On the other hand, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the “scribbling women,” cannot simply labelled as a sentimental domestic novel with its deep concern with the slavery issue and huge social response it brought forth. Then, as we can draw from the fact that both Hawthorne and Stowe employed the same cultural situation in which domestic ideology pervaded and the literary market was undergoing a radical change, Hawthorne and the “scribbling women” were cultural performers, who responded to the same cultural scene, sometimes in a different way but more often in a similar way.

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