逆流する愛と聖父のジェンダー : 『緋文字』にアメリカン・ウェイを読む

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Sacvan Bercovitch has clarified in The Rites of Assent that, in stark contrast to European individualism, which is likely to confront society, paradoxically, American individualism has had a share in consensus building and contributed to the Americanization of society. This process is called the American Way. Hester's struggle to multiply the meaning of the letter A in The Scarlet Letter (1850) -from the initial Adultery to Angel and Admirable-does not interfere with the American Way. On the supposition that the nineteenth-century domesticity and gender ideology has stealthily slipped into the seventeenth-century setting of the story, I investigate how Chillingworth the cuckold and Dimmesdale the paramour contribute together to the American Way. Chillingworth is denied the privileges, first, of creating an affectionate, patriarchic family, as evaluated in nineteenth-century America, second, of occupying a patriarchic position, and third, of establishing a male patriarchal gender identity (which he becomes obsessed with retrieving). He becomes all the more sensitive to his own impotency and Abject physique when he sees Pearl, the child of Hester and Dimmesdale. As a "living hieroglyphic," not the Alphabet of the letter A that could be decoded, Pearl is a mere infant-an infant whose etymology is 'incapable of speech'; not the suitable object to be appropriated by the learned man in a prerogative position like Chillingworth, the manipulator of the Language/Logos in the so-called Symbolic of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The author lets the revengeful Chillingworth misuse the nineteenth-century domestic ideology that warned of the threat of that nameless horror represented by the bachelor, i. e., homosexual sex. Chillingworth gains support from this ideology, pretends to be a pious Christian, and takes advantage of the historical fact that the New England colonists were prone to compare men of political power to biblical figures. (For example, Winthrop the first Governor was compared to Moses and Nehemiah, and Cotton the minister was compared to Abraham, Joshuah, and John.) By actually living with minister Dimmesdale on the pretext of treating his psychosomatic condition, Chillingworth creates the sacrosanct family, insinuates domestic ideology, behaves within Dimmesdale's psyche as a sacred father, or punishing super-ego, and thus preys on Dimmesdale with the Oedipal sense of guilt. Psychologically, the old physician confronts the minister as if he were blaming the latter for committing a deed likely to rouse the homophobic, i. e., forming an immature umbilical relation with Hester, mother-goddess-like self-willed woman. To prevent the patriarchy he stands on from backsliding into the pre-Oedipal Eros, and to prevent the basis of patriarchy, i. e., the compulsory heterosexuality, from breaking down, Chillingworth acts as the Law enforcing/castrating father. However, the tactics Chillingworth employs are not flawless in terms of the gender stability he has to maintain. In his observing eyes, Dimmesdale appears to reside in an enviable patriarchic family-the family composed of the minister, Hester, and Pearl, the family exclusive of outsiders. According to Freud's theory of narcissism, Dimmesdale is, first, the model the physician wants to imitate, second, his opponent/persecutor, and third, his homosexual lover. This means that the male gender-apparently based on Emersonian self-reliant man-becomes destabilized, and that the more closely Chillingworth approaches his former state of patriarch, the more difficult it becomes for him to reach his ultimate goal of regaining his masculinity, the gender identity supposedly established on the compulsory heterosexual norm. The author detected the common anxiety shared by the intelligent men of the seventeenth century like Chillingworth and the men of power of the nineteenth century like Hawthorne: the former were fearful of the antinomians who, like Hester, claimed thorough individualism and direct communication with God, and the latter were cautious against those who were influenced by the effect of revolutions in European countries around 1848, and those who imbibed radical concepts of freedom, including proto-feminism and the dismantling of the family. The author lets Chillingworth protect the patriarchy and its foundation of the heterosexual norm and sexism-in a paradoxical way-by robbing him of heterosexuality, letting him remain a bachelor, and uniting him homosexually with Dimmesdale. Chillingworth's homosexual stance is not in conflict with the American Way, i. e., with the cause of preserving the androcentric society, because the heterosexual and the homosexual alike are prone to strive to maintain patriarchy. Punishing and loving the minister, and thus paradoxically placing himself in the American Way, i. e., the patriarchal consensus, Chillingworth barely finds his raison d'etre by forging the Oedipal space of the pseudo-patriarchal-family together with the minister.
2001-12-10

逆流する愛と聖父のジェンダー : 『緋文字』にアメリカン・ウェイを読む

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