Hawthorne, Gender, and Death

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction

   • Roberta Weldon

   Pages 1-12

3. Unholy Dying in The Scarlet Letter

   • Roberta Weldon

   Pages 13-31

4. “The Custom-House,” the Secular Pilgrim, and the Happy Death

   • Roberta Weldon

   Pages 33-51

5. “Familial Immortality” and the “Dying of Death” in The House of the Seven Gables

   • Roberta Weldon

   Pages 53-81

6. From Melancholy to Mourning: Death and Politics in The Blithedale Romance

   • Roberta Weldon

   Pages 83-111

7. “Intimate Equality”: Sacrifice and Death in The Marble Faun

   • Roberta Weldon

   Pages 113-131

8. Conclusion

   • Roberta Weldon

   Pages 133-152

9. Back Matter

   Pages 153-203

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This book draws on a range of critical approaches, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, political justice theory, and feminist theory, to consider the ways that strategies of death denial and their compensatory consolations offer insight into the ethical, gender, and religious questions raised by Hawthorne's novels.

• Christianity
• gender
• novel
• pilgrim

"Weldon explores the heretofore occulted connections between the violence Hawthone's male protagonists directed against women and their fears of psychic disintegration, mortality, and social annihilation. Weldon's persuasive elaborations of this claim enable her to demonstrate, quite convincingly in my estimation, how the denial of death constitutes a transcultural and even a v structure of masculinist self-construction." - Donald Pease, Avalon Chair of Humanities and Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College

Roberta Weldon is Associate Professor of English at University of Houston.    

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