ABSTRACT
In Hawthorne’s times, the development of manhood was closely aligned with the self-made man and a socially prescribed sexuality. Readers encounter an America haunted by hetero-normative masculinity in the characters’ degenerate spirits and bodily debilitation. It mirrors the growing schism between competing antebellum ideologies of Jacksonian self-made manhood, reform models of health reformers, conduct literature, and the temperance movement. Hawthorne discerned the inherent cruelties underlying this world of a competitive search for self. Despite his belief in the symbolic value and refined moral nature of the body, he goes beyond a mere reflection on the corporeality of the antebellum male. The portrayal of transgressive bodies in Hawthorne’s stories affirms creative resistance and a reinvention of subjectivity through a Deleuzian “productive desire” beyond mere horror. Masculine anxieties, the pathologization of grief, and male mourning recreates the male subject turning into a becoming-minoritarian and utilizes the Gothic’s “deadly iteration” in a collective sentiment of nationhood. This article argues that the traditional Gothic is transformed from deception and disease into postmodern affect, desire, and body, transforming it into a positive, fluid model of manhood. This masculinity can be interpreted as “an assemblage of affective economies” challenging unachievable ideals in early American democracy.
