In a Pig's Eye: Masculinity, Mastery, and the Returned Gaze of The Blithedale Romance

The young Ellen Langton stares at Fanshawe, the eponymous protagonist of Hawthorne's first novel, marvelling at his beauty; the Minister Hooper prevents anyone from seeing his face, hidden behind a black veil; Feathertop, believing he cuts a dashing figure, stares at himself in the mirror, discovering, to his horror, that he is merely the mirage of a man, a witch's illusion; Giovanni stares at lush, poisonous Beatrice Rappacini in her equally beautiful and deadly garden, little realizing that her father and Rappacini's own scientific rival, Baglioni, stares at Giovanni staring at her; Chillingworth triumphantly stares at the exposed flesh of sleeping, guilt-ridden Dimmesdale: these examples of the function of the gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne's work metonymically symbolize numerous important issues that inform his oeuvre. Hawthorne's intensely, provocatively visual literary work invites cinematic comparisons. Joining numerous critiques in the field of film criticism, this essay challenges Laura Mulvey's well-known theory of the male gaze, using Hawthorne's work as an example of representation that complicates gendered subject positions vis-a-vis the gaze. (1) In his work, Hawthorne makes it impossible to assign clear positions of dominance and submission. In so doing, he offers valuable contributions to our understanding of the construction and organization of gender and sexuality in the antebellum United States. By rendering male subjects as the objects as well as the wielders of the gaze, Hawthorne insists that we view men as possible objects of erotic contemplation, thereby beckoning queer and feminist analysis. If the radical nature of Hawthorne's work lies, in part, in his insistence on rendering male figures the object of multiple gazes, Hawthorne's 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance poses a theoretical dilemma, since its protagonist, the cynical poet Miles Coverdale, clearly wields the gaze: one might even say his chief agenda is eluding the gaze of others by gazing at them first. In this essay, I examine the psychic costs of wielding the gaze, arguing that Hawthorne demonstrates the considerable potential personal risks involved in the avid desire to look, which he never treats as an act or symbol of power but, instead, as the very evidence of the debilitated fragility of the gazer. (21) am not arguing that Hawthorne depicts the phallic gazer as a victim who should be pitied for the patriarchal power he must embody and enact through gazing; this essay eschews any special pleading for the anxious condition of aggrieved American manhood. As Suzanne R. Stewart, in a study of late nineteenth-century masochism and manhood, writes, "The problem with so many postmodern theories of the subject is the elevation of the failure of subjectivity into a general condition of all subjectivity, a failure that is then celebrated as subversive." (3) The subversive energy of The Blithedale Romance lies in the manner whereby Hawthorne exposes Coverdale's act of seeming masculine dominance--wielding the gaze, voyeuristically devouring what he sees--as indicative of a hopelessly unsuccessful embodiment of male power. The novel can be read as a critique of developing antebellum forms and theories of American masculinity; an evocation of queer threats to it; and as a phobically defensive treatment of the issues of effeminacy that personally plagued Hawthorne. Moreover, and more pressingly, I will argue that The Blithedale Romance provides a particular theorization of heteronormative masculinity's relationship to the male gaze. I compare constructions and theorizations of the voyeuristic gaze in Hawthorne, Freud, Lacan, and Alfred Hitchcock, artists and thinkers who all use the voyeuristic gaze as a means of both establishing and deconstructing normative models of patriarchal power. My chief focus is, however, Hawthorne, and in bringing in psychoanalytic and cinematic perspectives, I mean primarily to illuminate his work, particularly in the ways in which his ineluctable conservatism competes with a potential radicalism--his phobic demonizations with a heroic and embattled sensitivity. …