Alison Easton’s essay, “Hawthorne and the question of women,” approaches how Hawthorne’s texts interact with gender construction and gender binaries from the nineteenth century. Easton frequently connects Hawthorne’s personal life experiences (such as his marriage in 1842) and larger social happenings in America (urbanization) to his writing.
This essay traces how marriage, class, public/private sphere, femininity, and gender constructions shift, change, and complicate throughout Hawthorne’s works. Easton uses the ideas concerning “True Womanhood,” 19th century feminism (comments from Margaret Fuller repeat in the essay), and the looming “Woman Question” to analyze Hawthorne’s short stories and novels.
Her main argument is that gender concerns were rapidly changing and shifting in the 19th century Post-Revolution and urbanized American Society, and that Hawthorne reflects this turbulence in his writing. When analyzing his worth from a
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I enjoyed this within the essay. It provides necessary context to understanding Hawthorne’s complicated work, and includes information on the time period he was writing in. Admittedly, the essay may be too extensive if you are focusing on only one piece of Hawthorne’s writing. It’s more like a Norton Anthology than an individual book.
Her sources were mainly essays printed via universities, which makes sense given the essay’s inclusion in the Cambridge University Companion to Hawthorne’s writing. She also cites a few books to provide context for her writing on love and marriage. An example would be her using The Origins of Love and Hate for a “psychoanalytic exploration of tenderness and modernity’s taboo on it”(98). Mostly, these essays are historical accounts of gender, femininity, Hawthorne’s life, or class studies in the United