Reviewed by:

• Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David B. Diamond
• Jonathan A. Cook (bio)

Although the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for the acuity of its psychological insights, surprisingly few critical studies have addressed this topic beyond exploring the pervasive presence of the Puritan doctrine of original sin and its varied psychological sources and consequences. In The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966), Frederick Crews produced an influential study of Hawthorne’s fiction premised on the theory that unresolved Oedipal aggressions and repressed sexual drives suffused the author’s work—but the passage of time has revealed the reductive nature of many of Crews’s findings, even as the author formally renounced his embrace of Freudian models and expressed dissatisfaction with his own work in the 1989 reissue of his study. On a related front, biographical studies of the author with a psychological focus have sought to shed potential light on examples of aberrant behavior in his fiction, with Gloria C. Erlich in Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction (1984) raising the idea of Hawthorne’s possible physical abuse by his uncle, Robert Manning, and Philip Young in Hawthorne’s Secret (1984) pointing to the colonial history of incest in Hawthorne’s mother’s family, the Mannings, and suggesting the possibility of such intimacy between Hawthorne and his reclusive older sister Elizabeth. More recently, David Greven in The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud and the Politics of Gender (2012) combined Freudian and Lacanian insights with queer theory to critique Hawthorne’s representations of hegemonic manhood. Over the last few decades, Hawthorne’s writings have also been subject to a variety of ideological interventions that have threatened to diminish his status as an author. Only rarely do we find literary studies that, immune to critical fashion, substantially illuminate whole new swathes of the writer’s work. [End Page 816]

With the appearance of David Diamond’s new psychoanalytic study of key factors of characterization in Hawthorne’s four major novels, Hawthorne criticism finally has an analysis that provides credible new psychological insights into key elements of the author’s four full-length romances. As a clinician who has spent decades teaching and overseeing the treatment of patients, Diamond brings his real-world experience to the realm of Hawthorne criticism with which he has long been engaged as reader and scholar. Diamond thus brings his psychoanalytic expertise to an interpretation of Hawthorne’s four major works of fiction, examining the characters of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables, Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, and Miriam in The Marble Faun. Largely eschewing professional jargon, Diamond frames his analyses with a basic paradigm of the psyche well suited to Hawthorne’s writings. As he explains in Chapter 1, Diamond takes as an interpretive model for his approach to Hawthorne’s fiction the early sketch “The Haunted Mind” (1835), postulating that the narrator’s late-night experience, between waking and dreaming, of the welling up of unconscious psychic materials provides a productive paradigm for a series of key scenes and characterizations in Hawthorne’s major fiction. As Hawthorne’s narrator writes,

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open.

(p. 306)

Although the narrator goes on to denominate the upwelling of midnight phantoms in his mind as allegorical personifications of Passion, Feeling, Sorrow, Hope, Disappointment, Fatality, and Shame, Diamond interprets the experience as an episode of psychic disruption from the unconscious that offers the potential for personal transformation, both positive and negative. As he notes, [End Page 817]

This confrontation with the unconscious is the site of a transformation which lies near each romance’s psychological, moral, and spiritual core. In addition, the figure of Death, the great teacher in all of Hawthorne’s romances...

审核人：

• 霍桑浪漫史的精神分析读物：大卫·B·戴蒙德关于无意识危机与转变的叙述
• 乔纳森·A·库克（个人简介）

尽管纳撒尼尔霍桑的小说以其敏锐的心理洞察力而闻名，但令人惊讶的是，除了探索清教徒原罪教义的普遍存在及其各种心理来源和后果之外，很少有批判性研究涉及这个话题。在父亲的罪孽：霍桑的心理主题(1966)，弗雷德里克克鲁斯对霍桑的小说进行了一项有影响的研究，其前提是未解决的俄狄浦斯攻击和压抑的性冲动充斥着作者的作品——但时间的流逝揭示了克鲁斯的许多发现的还原性，即使作者正式放弃了他对弗洛伊德模型的拥护，并在 1989 年重新发行他的研究时表达了对他自己的工作的不满。在相关方面，以心理学为重点对作者进行的传记研究试图揭示他小说中异常行为的潜在例子，Gloria C. Erlich 在家庭主题和霍桑的小说 (1984) 中提出了霍桑可能的身体行为的想法在霍桑的秘密中被叔叔罗伯特·曼宁和菲利普·扬虐待(1984) 指出霍桑母亲的曼宁家族乱伦的殖民历史，并暗示霍桑和他隐居的姐姐伊丽莎白之间存在这种亲密关系的可能性。最近，大卫·格雷文 (David Greven) 在《男子气概的脆弱性：霍桑、弗洛伊德和性别政治》 (2012) 中将弗洛伊德和拉康的见解与酷儿理论相结合，批判了霍桑对霸权男子气概的表述。在过去的几十年里，霍桑的作品也受到各种意识形态干预的影响，这些干预威胁到他作为作家的地位。我们很少发现文学研究不受批评时尚的影响，实质上阐明了作家作品的全新领域。【816页完】

随着大卫·戴蒙德对霍桑四部主要小说人物塑造关键因素的新精神分析研究的出现，霍桑批评终于有了一种分析，为作者四部长篇浪漫小说的关键要素提供了可靠的新心理学见解。作为一名花费数十年时间教授和监督患者治疗的临床医生，戴蒙德将他的真实世界经验带入了他作为读者和学者长期参与的霍桑批评领域。因此，戴蒙德将他的精神分析专长运用到对霍桑四大小说作品的解读中，考察了《红字》中的亚瑟·丁梅斯代尔和海丝特·白兰、《七角墙之屋》中的霍尔格雷夫、Blithedale Romance和The Marble Faun中的 Miriam 。戴蒙德在很大程度上避开了专业术语，他的分析采用了非常适合霍桑作品的基本心理范式。正如他在第 1 章中解释的那样，戴蒙德将早期素描“鬼魂”（1835 年）作为他处理霍桑小说的解释模型，假设叙述者在清醒和梦境之间的深夜经历，无意识的通灵材料为霍桑主要小说中的一系列关键场景和人物塑造提供了富有成效的范例。正如霍桑的叙述者所写，

在每个人的内心深处，都有一座坟墓和一座地牢，尽管上面的灯光、音乐、狂欢可能会让我们忘记他们的存在，忘记埋葬的人，或者他们隐藏的囚犯。但有时，最常见的是在午夜，那些黑暗的容器会被敞开。

（第 306 页）

尽管叙述者继续将他脑海中升起的午夜幻影命名为激情、情感、悲伤、希望、失望、宿命和羞耻的寓言化身，但戴蒙德将这种体验解释为无意识的精神分裂情节，提供了个人转变的潜力，包括积极的和消极的。正如他所说，[第 817 页结束]

这种与无意识的对抗是转变的场所，它位于每个浪漫的心理、道德和精神核心附近。此外，死神的形象，霍桑所有传奇故事中的伟大老师……