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

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 t [...]
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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.