Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics

by T. Walter Herbert Jr.

The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne―for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness―was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.

356 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 1993

Reviews

[Morleena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mostly enjoyed this rather scholarly overview of the Hawthornes. Picked it up after reading Nathaniel's "Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny" hoping for some insight. Instead, I got a pretty dark view of the family as a whole that did not comport with the journal entries. Author relied heavily on interpreting the family dynamics through Hawthorne's fiction--perhaps a little too much. Also, considerable insinuation without grounding in facts.

Like all families, a complicated one that is not easily defined or explained.

[Kristi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seductively written, Herbert's rendering of the Hawthorne family's psychological life is not without startling insight and beautiful nuances. Yet Herbert's sensational interpretation is heavily laden with Freudian psychoanalysis. The obsession with sexuality that permeates Herbert's version of the Hawthorne family is grossly unbalanced and grotesquely Gothic, distorting the truth of the narrative into a lamentably contorted monstrosity. In fact the narrative becomes rather tiresome in the author's pedantic and exaggerated attention to sexual nuances. Nor does it present a fair, balanced, or accurate representation of the Hawthorne's familial relationships.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written by one of my college professors. In fact, he was working on it while I was in college. Those who like Hawthorne will want to read this book.

[Den S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has great information about Hawthorne, but the author is a little over-consumed with sexual issues...he nearly accuses Hawthorne of being a pedophile at one point.