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The marble mother: Hawthorne's iconographies of the feminine.(women and femininity in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne)(Critical Essay)

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From: Studies in American Fiction
Date: 20030322
Author:Onderdonk, Todd

To participate in the critical discourse on Hawthorne is to step into a fast-rushing stream, crowded with fishermen of varying orientations, all in hot pursuit of a specimen that, no matter how many times it is caught, always ends up back in the water. Thus the sport of Hawthorne criticism has its pleasures and short-lived rewards, but perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the catch has not been its flesh, but its slipperiness, the accompanying sense that the canonical "big one" always gets away. Textually well-supported arguments, often diametrically opposed--we might want to ...

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