Engendering Empathy for the De-gendered : Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) draws the impetus to unfold The Scarlet Letter (1850) from the anger of Chillingworth, the old physician, whose wife Hester is stolen by the respectable minister Dimmesdale, and thus loses the prerogative position of patriarchy and patriarchal masculine gender. If we analyze this phenomenon in accordance with the theory of Kristeva, the Lacanian psychoanalyst and feminist, it follows that if deprived of masculinity, the repressed corporeality of Chillingworth comes to the fore and replaces the de-corporealised male body that monopolizes Logos (the world in Lacanian psychoanalysis). The corporeality that resurges is abject and closely related to the realm of woman, especially that of mother. If Chillingworth's exposed corporeality was good to see, he could be saved. Analogized to "a dark flabby leaf," and to "a barren and blasted spot" [that could produce only] "vegetable wickedness," the ugliness of his body is overemphasized with exhaustion of life, sterility, and impotence. With his monstrosity and freakishness distinguished, he transforms himself into a mass of flesh or a mere unsightly matter; not a productive mother, but a terrifying phallic (m)other/monster; in other words, a(n) (m)other/other, the being other from the patriarchic community, or, the subaltern. If we refer to the findings of anthropologists and mythologists showing that the patriarch was established only after the conquest of mother goddess/monster, we understand that Chillingworth, who represents patriarchic Puritan society with his apparent pious attitude and who misuses its dogma, ironically becomes an object to be surmounted and driven from society by a patriarchic hero. If one sees that Chillingworth is compared to a "snake," another word for a monster, one understands that the feature of mother goddess/monster is not attributed solely to Hester, the resilient virago expressive of her self will. It is natural that the abject phallic mother should be generous to homosexual love since s/he reigns over the primitive pre-Oedipal area, or what Kristeva calls the semiotic where mother and child are umbilically related, and where the binary gender is still uncertain. The physician-turned-phallic-mother instills into the minister love mixed with resentment and becomes homosexual, which makes it difficult for him to retain his initial aim of retrieving the patriarchic position, and of reconfirming the male gender, because the premise of the patriarch depends on the compulsory heterosexual norm that ought to have enabled him to have his children and family. Unlike Hester, bearing a showy embroidered letter A on the breast of her gown, the identity of Chillingworth as homosexual is difficult to distinguish as such. Indeed the homosexual is forcefully categorized into the group of subalterns-the group of subalterns composed of women, non-whites, and the like. Unlike them, however, the homosexual is neither a visible being nor a necessary evil that might be helpful to the self-styled heterosexual men in establishing their identity. Rather it can be safely said that he is all the more subversive to the patriarchy and therefore fated to be on the brink of banishment from the society based on compulsory heterosexuality. Chillingworth appears to represent patriarchic Puritanism, but he has to be content with his critical position as an invisible queer in the patriarchal society. In the mid-nineteenth-century America, the imperialistic masculinity, the resilient will, and the physique robust and aggressive enough to acquire the western lands were admired and requisite under the movement of Manifest Destiny. In this context, in the present terminology, what was the reaction of the author, a man noted for his feminine beauty and aura, a suspicious queer? At the critical moment of his dismissal from the customs office, he must have felt excluded from society and transformed into the being other from the society, the subaltern. Still worse, his gender anxiety rooted deep in his own physicality must have surged up again, making it difficult for him to assume a pitiless stance toward Chillingworth, the queer subaltern. Hawthorne must have felt that, despite the difference of appearances, he himself possessed stuff in tune with Chillingworth. Realizing the impossibility and futility of maintaining the prerogative masculine position or the physicality-sublimating role as speaking subject, he must have spontaneously under-taken the load of de-gendered subaltern.
2001-12-20

Engendering Empathy for the De-gendered : Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter

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