Home > Explore Content > All Issues > Article View
Zenobia and Coverdale’s Veil: Hawthorne’s Sexual Politics in The Blithedale Romance
Cross-Cultural Studies
2020,
60(), pp.301-327
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2020.60..301
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2020.60..301
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
-
This essay examines if Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance suggests a prospective feminist vision distancing from his contemporary dominant belief in gender. First, this essay identifies Zenobia’s inner inconsistency, focusing on her voices torn between defending her feminist cause energetically in the beginning and undercutting it skeptically at the latter part of the story. Arguably, despite her seeming eagerness in enhancing women’s rights as shown in Nina Baym’s longstanding claim, Zenobia continues to advocate the established notion of womanhood, unveiling her conservative voices. Second, this essay investigates the irreparably discordant perspectives that the narrator Coverdale as Hawthorne’s persona has assumed toward gender issues. Similar to Zenobia, he discloses his rear view wherein he promotes surreptitiously his or the author’s conservative, rigid ideology of gender as undeniably dichotomous and hierarchical, while at the front he is disguised as an earnest supporter of the feminist cause. Also, this essay articulates that Coverdale’s disguised sexual politics cannot be sustained safely, by testifying how his narrative that has chased ‘chimaera’ as an illusion of gender is being disrupted unknowingly by itself. Thus, aside from referring to a historical context around Hawthorne, a close reading concerning Zenobia and Coverdale’s (un-)veiling of gender ideology and a deconstructive approach to Coverdale’s narrative would facilitate elucidating the sexual politics underneath The Blithedale Romance and Hawthorne’s contentious attitude toward gender as well.
90 Viewed
Print this page
Download PDF