The Home and the Asylum. Antebellum Representations of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

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The Home and the Asylum. Antebellum Representations of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

Journal Title: Kultura Popularna - Year 2017, Vol 4, Issue 54

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables regarding his depiction of the nineteenth-century ideals of femininity: the cult of true womanhood and domesticity. Drawing primarily on original material, it will be shown that emerging nineteenth-century psychiatry – asylum medicine – has strongly corroborated American ideals of femininity and their presumably restorative influence in cases of mental derangement. Hawthorne’s portrayals of women and madmen negotiate antebellum concepts of femininity and psychiatry, juxtapose the asylum against the home, and emphasize the author’s embeddedness in nineteenth-century medico-psychological theories.<br/><br/>

Authors and Affiliations

Maria Kaspirek

Keywords

EP ID EP271982
DOI 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6714
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