This essay analyzes how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance responds to the new womanhood suggested by the women’s rights movement in nineteenth-century America. The novel is often misunderstood as a conservative work that conventionally typicalizes women into the two categories of the angelic and the evil and punishes the evil woman. However, this essay argues that the novel does not reiterate such a conventional attitude toward women, but rather it examines how the cult of true womanhood is constructed by patriarchal ideology and explores how the newly suggested womanhood conflicts with conventional womanhood. The novel deals with such critical points through the relationship between woman’s veil and male gaze on it. By putting the white veil, or the cult of true womanhood, on women, the patriarchal society maintains male supremacy over women. The Blithedale Romance particularly focuses on male intellectuals’ ambivalent reaction to the new womanhood through the narrator Coverdale: although he intellectually understands the power structure related to the conventional womanhood and has curiosity about the new one, he is still bound to the conventional ideas of women and thus constantly attempts to keep the unconventional woman Zenobia under his gaze. Coverdale’s attitude toward Zenobia illustrates male intellectuals’ anxiety over the advent of new ideas that may threaten the existing social order.
목차
Works Cited Abstract
키워드
진정한 여성성 숭배베일남성의 시선여성권리운동나다니엘 호손the cult of true womanhoodveilmale gazethe women rights’ movementNathaniel Hawthorne
한국중앙영어영문학회 [The Jungang English Language And Literature Association Of Korea]
설립연도
1968
분야
인문학>영어와문학
소개
본 학회는 영미어문학의 학술연구와 이에 부합하는 아래의 사업을 기획 수행하며,
또한 회원 상호간의 친목을 도모함을 목적으로 한다.
1. 학회지 발간
2. 연구 발표회, 강연회, 공동연구
3. 영미어문학 관련 도서출판
4. 영미어문학 관계 도서 및 자료의 모집 및 비치
5. 기타 본회의 목적 달성에 필요한 사업
간행물
간행물명
영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]