Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 22 of Sexual Personae

Defining American decadence

Prior to 1750 American culture was dominated by patriarchal Puritanism, which excluded the Dionysian influence. Paglia says, "America’s sex problem began with the banishment of the maternal principle from Protestant cosmology." (p. 572) Early American culture was all about Apollonianism in the form of Enlightenment intellectuality, science worship, patriarchy, and repression of the chaotic Dionysian/feminine side of culture.

 

However, in the late 1700s Rousseau and French Romanticism brought back the Dionysian feminine principle in the form of nature-worship, rejection of hierarchy and structure, and passivity of the male. In America, Wordsworth and Coleridge embodied that trend: Wordsworth developed the "sentimental" variant of American Romanticism, while Coleridge produced the "daemonic" variant. (See my notes for Chapters 11 and 12 for more on Wordsworth and Coleridge.)

 

Chapter 22 covers American authors writing in the mid-1800s and beyond: Primarily Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Paglia says that by this time Puritanism with its harsh Apollonian demands was worn out and "debilitated": She says, "Hawthorne shows patriarchal will waning in The House of the Seven Gables, with its decadent relics of shabby mansion and inherited curse." (p. 572) In the meantime, American literature had fallen under the influence of English Romanticism, which took the writers down the path of the "daemonic" variant of Romanticism developed 50 years earlier by Coleridge: Paglia says, "English Romanticism, a neo-pagan cult of the sexual archetypal, arrived as a second revolution, daemonizing American literature." (p. 573)

 

Paglia titled this chapter "American Decadents," but in the chapter itself she notes that the American authors covered in this chapter were actually examples of Decadent Late Romanticism rather than fully-mature Decadence. She says, "American Romanticism is really Decadent Late Romanticism, a style of sexual perversity, closure, and fragmentation or decay." (p. 572) Speaking of Poe, Paglia says, "Poe moves Romanticism into its Mannerist late phase." (572)

 

So technically it seems that these authors were Late Romantics, which puts them on the borderline between Romanticism and Decadence. But Paglia analyzes the American authors of Chapter 22 in terms of their increasingly Decadent features and mannerisms; and given that the title of the chapter is "American Decadents," I will follow in Paglia's footsteps and analyze the authors here according to the rules for Decadent androgynes (and classify them as such in the table at the top of these notes).

 

Recap: Dionysian-leaning androgynes versus Apollonian-leaning androgynes

In my notes for Chapter 20 I said that Decadent androgynes seem to fall into two camps: Dionysian-leaning androgynes versus Apollonian-leaning androgynes.

• Chapter 19 of Sexual Personae described Dionysian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Dionysian-leaning androgynes indulge their Dionysian side by seeking out commanding mother figures and becoming devoted to them. They normally repress their Apollonian side. When taken to the extreme, their Dionysian attraction to the maternal may turn into a masochistic worship of cruel, punishing mother figures in the form of female vampires.

• Chapters 20 and 21 of Sexual Personae describe Apollonian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Apollonian-leaning androgynes indulge their Apollonian side by practicing aggressive aestheticism and hierarchism. They normally repress their Dionysian side. When taken to the extreme, their Apollonian aestheticism and hierarchism may turn into hedonism, cruelty, chaos, and self-destruction.

 

The batch of authors described in Chapter 22 (Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville) generally fall into the Dionysian-leaning camp. In other words, Protestantism banned the maternal influence from American life, but the Romantic authors brought it back in the form of nature worship and punishing mother figures. These authors lean toward Decadence in portraying the maternal as increasingly vampiric. 

 

Edgar Allen Poe

Women as vampires

Paglia says that Poe "introduces the numinous woman to America." (p. 573) As Poe describes them, women are tyrant mothers, vampires, and evil goddesses. Paglia says, "His major women, Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella, tall, beautiful, and strangely erudite, are all versions of Coleridge’s vampire Geraldine..." (p. 573) In the short story Ligeia, the narrator's second wife dies and his first wife "returns from the grave to invade the body of her successor." (p. 573) The same thing happens in the short story Morella, where a dead woman returns by possessing her own daughter. Paglia says "Ligeia is mother nature and archaic night, an eruption of the pagan chthonian. She defies God’s law of mortality because she, not he, is the resurrection and the life." (p. 574)

 

Women as entrapping wombs

In Poe's world, men are haunted by "Gothic entombments." (p. 572) Paglia says that these are symbolic of the entrapping female womb of the maternal vampire. In some cases female nature comes alive and swallows characters up; in others, the characters are trapped in rooms or enclosures. A few examples:

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Nature swallows people up

--A Descent into the Maelström: The male character "is sucked into nature’s maw" and "Poe’s hero must ascend from the bowels of the earth-mother [...] Poe, like Sade, sets sex into the sinister continuum of savage nature." (pp. 575-576)

--The Fall of the House of Usher: The mansion is swallowed up by the adjacent lake, which Paglia describes as a "panorama of civilization overwhelmed by the chthonian. [...] The cracked house of Usher, an Apollonian head fractured by madness, surrenders to the Dionysian, the murky womb-world of the primeval abyss." (p. 576)

--The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym: Paglia says, "Pym meets the nature mother, into whom he is reabsorbed. [...] The white curtain over life’s mystery parts, and the frail soul-boat plunges into the birth canal." (p. 579)

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Rooms or enclosures

--The Masque of the Red Death: Nature appears in the form of a plague decimating the population. Prince Prospero tries to shut out the plague by secluding himself and his friends in an abbey and holding a masked ball (a "masque") there; but the plague assumes human form, enters the abbey, chases Prospero through the various rooms of the abbey, and catches him in the last room. Paglia says, "This chamber, where prince and spectre meet, is the womb, light piercing the membrane in a ruddy stream. [...] The ebony clock of Poe’s seventh chamber is the ominous heartbeat of the maternal body." (pp. 576-577)

--The Pit and the Pendulum: Paglia says that the torture chamber where the narrator is trapped is "a body-warmed womb-world [...] The story takes us into 'the red walls' of the vagina dentata." (p. 577)

 

Paglia says that Poe is rejecting Puritanism and reviving the Dionysian Great Mother of the pre-Christian pagan world. The maternal influence is vampiric, which Poe describes in terms of anatomy: Maternal anatomy is punishing and fearsome because it is both the beginning and end of life. Poe's stories "fuse the traumas of birth and death." Paglia says, "Characters are buried alive in Poe because he sees nature as a hostile womb from which humanity can never be fully born. His master image is like the Mycenaean tholos, the subterranean beehive womb-tomb. His stories are Late Romantic tholoi fusing the traumas of birth and death. His world suffers an interminable, festering pregnancy. [...] Hence Poe’s suffocation and claustrophobia." (pp. 577-8)

 

Decadent closure and partition (Berenice)

Paglia says that Poe's fascination with "Gothic entombments" is a form of Decadent closure. She says, "Poe is obsessed with closure, from The Premature Burial to The Cask of Amontillado, with its murder by walling-up. In Maelström, Charybdis to The Pit’s Scylla, he even converts the flat sea into a vacuum-vortex of female internality. Poe’s closed spaces are always vaguely anatomical. They are literally living rooms." (p. 577) Paglia says that Decadent Late Romanticism is "a style of sexual perversity, closure, and fragmentation or decay." (p. 572)

 

Taking closure and partition separately:

 

Decadent closure: Decadent closure is a device to reduce the anxiety of the world and modern freedoms. Recapping the nature of Decadent androgynes and their need for Decadent closure:

 

In my notes for Chapter 9 I described the onset of Decadence as follows: In the past society was mostly hierarchical and Apollonian. But in modern times democratic reforms have resulted in greater freedom and a shift toward Dionysianism. As society becomes more free, Romantics increasingly turn away from the strictness and rules of Apollonianism; instead, they indulge the freedoms and permissiveness of Dionysianism, repressing Apollonianism in the process. However, extremes of Dionysian freedom eventually turn into a free fall of chaos resulting in anxiety due to the loss of order, stability, and predictability. Repressed Apollonianism returns in daemonic form as a fear/temptation/craving for closure, boundaries, and hierarchy. (See my notes on Chapters 6 and 14 for more on daemonism.) The Dionysian "overfullness" of the modern world traps people in anxiety; in turn, people calm their anxiety by creating their own personal version of structure in the form of retreat, passivity and self-punishment.

 

In my notes for Chapter 16 I said that the Decadent androgyne in particular calms anxiety by making himself as free of attachments as possible. He accomplishes this by receding from the Dionysian chaos of the world and locking himself away in a bubble of passivity, self-containment, and self-sufficiency. The Decadent androgyne backs off and observes the world passively and without empathy or connection, awaiting something to come along and stir him or her, be it a great beauty or a great ugliness.

 

This becomes Decadent closure: Life in a self-contained bubble turns into confinement. In other words, the androgyne frees himself from anxiety, but that freedom comes at the price of passivity, solipsism, and self-imprisonment. 

 

In his writings, Poe embodies this mindset and projects this viewpoint out onto the world in general. He projects his own bubble of the Decadent androgyne out into the world as a generalized state of entrapment and "Gothic entombments" for his narrator and for mankind as a whole.

 

Decadent partition: Decadent partition usually accompanies Decadent closure. As I said, the Decadent androgyne sits in his self-contained bubble and observes the world passively, awaiting something to come along and stir him or her, be it a great beauty or a great ugliness. To him, the Dionysian world is overfull, overwhelming, and chaotic; it causes him anxiety, so he uses his repressed Apollonianism in daemonic form to dissect the world, divide it up, and pick out those few details that represent great beauty or great ugliness. This repressed Apollonianism turns into the "aggressive western eye" and Decadent partition: The Decadent androgyne seizes upon some small detail (great beauty or ugliness) which then becomes an object of fascination and obsession.

 

In Poe's case, the world of tyrant mothers, vampires, and evil goddesses is Dionysian and therefore fills him with anxiety. So he uses Decadent partition and the aggressive western eye (courtesy of his repressed Apollonian side) to reduce women down to a single feature upon which he obsesses and fixates: Their reproductive organs. Poe projects this out into the world: Women are to be viewed as a maternal entrapping womb that confines humanity in the prison of Decadent closure. The result is Poe's tales of closure, obsession, and self-enslavement in the orbit of the vampire.

 

Berenice: Paglia illustrates this with Poe's short story entitled Berenice. The narrator marries his cousin Berenice; Berenice falls ill and wastes away until her white teeth become her most prominent feature. The narrator finds himself obsessing over her teeth. After Berenice dies of a seizure, the narrator continues to fixate on her teeth; the next day he wakes up to discover that in a trance he has dug up her body and extracted her teeth, which are in a box by his bed. He also learns to his horror that she was buried prematurely and is still alive.

 

Paglia points out that the narrator's obsession with Berenice's mouth and teeth is a displacement: Paglia says that Berenice's mouth is the fabled "vagina dentata," the toothed vagina. "The vagina dentata, which sucks in Huysmans’ hero, is a kind of beacon in Poe: his vampire Muse guides, leads, eats." (p. 574) So Berenice becomes another example of Poe's fixation on female reproductive organs, albeit disguised by displacement upward.

 

The narrator's fixation on the teeth represents Decadent partition. Paglia says, "Berenice’s teeth are an example of Decadent partition. Like Gautier’s mummy’s foot, they secede from the whole and greedily swell, with power. They invade and rape what the narrator calls 'the disordered chamber of my brain' [...] Poe’s narrator is crucified on the phallic teeth, which doom him to Decadent fixation and contraction. The teeth absorb his consciousness, condensing the universe to one totemic symbol." (pp. 574-575)

 

To sum up: As a Decadent androgyne, Poe is made anxious by the overfullness and chaos of the modern world. To calm his anxiety and regain control of his world, he practices Decadent fixation upon some single, salient feature of his vampire mother figures (their reproductive organs), and he engages in Decadent closure in the form of submission to punishing female figures (via entrapment in a "womb-tomb").

 

As Paglia puts it: "A task of the Late Romantic artist, I said, is to order the excess of phenomena pressing at the close of High Romanticism. Hence the narrator’s fixation on the teeth paradoxically frees him from enslavement to 'the multiplied objects of the external world.' Late Romantic sexual obsession is a metaphysical strategy, a formula of perceptual control. [...] Berenice’s teeth attract and secure the imagination, reducing the world to tolerable proportions." (p. 575)

 

The "male heroine"

As I said at the start of this essay, early American culture was dominated by patriarchal Puritanism. But in the late 1700s Rousseau and French Romanticism brought back the Dionysian feminine principle in the form of nature-worship, rejection of hierarchy and structure, and passivity of the male. Paglia refers to the passive male hero of Romantic literature as a "male heroine." 

 

At the time of the High Romanticism of Rousseau, the male heroine had "a womanlike sensitivity. [...] For Rousseau and the Romantics, the female principle is absolute. Man is a satellite in woman's sexual orbit." (p. 232) Fifty years later, under the influence of the Decadent Late Romanticism of Poe, the principle is the same except that the male heroine is now a masochistic Dionysian-leaning androgyne suffering ecstatically under the whip of a punishing maternal tormentor. Paglia says, "Poe’s persona or Magister Ludi is the Romantic male heroine of passive suffering. [...] He demands overt male subjection to female power." (p. 573)

 

Paglia notes that Poe's attraction to punishing mother figures is not sexual: "There is no sex instinct per se in Poe. His eroticism is in the paroxysms of suffering, the ecstatic, self-inflaming surrender to tyrant mothers. The narrator of Ligeia is a 'child' beneath the tutelage and 'infinite supremacy' of the heroine [...] Like Shelley and Mill, Poe dreams of male eclipse by a Muse-like female mind." (p. 573)

 

Berenice: Paglia details Poe's convoluted approach to sexuality in her analysis of the short story Berenice (described above). As I said above, the narrator's obsession with Berenice's mouth and teeth is a displacement: Paglia says that Berenice's mouth is the fabled "vagina dentata," the toothed vagina. As such, the narrator's attraction to the teeth is symbolically sexual, and the extraction of the teeth of the dead Berenice symbolically represents necrophilia. Paglia says that the narrator's removal of Berenice's teeth puts the narrator in the position of both rapist (insofar as he commits the act) and victim (insofar as the act was compulsive). Paglia says:

 

"The story’s climax, the surgical assault on Berenice’s body, is a perverse sex act, like the knife-rape of Balzac’s girl with the golden eyes (written the same year). In Poe, woman can be sexually approached only if dead. Person becomes object, in the Decadent manner. The narrator farms and harvests Berenice, as if she were an oyster and her teeth pearls. Sexual desire is diverted from animal flesh toward calcified mineral deposits, those antique enamels we carry in our mouth. The narrator can act only in a trance of self-removal. He is passive to his own extreme emotion, from which he is further separated by a memory lapse. Action is compulsive. The narrator would probably insist, with justice, that he is under criminal compulsion by Berenice herself, who lures him into barbarism by her chthonian force. Love leads to sadism." (p. 575)

 

Paglia notes the final plot twist in the story, wherein the narrator learns that Berenice was buried prematurely and turns out to be still alive, even after the removal of her teeth. Paglia sees this return from the dead as a feat of vampirism in the spirit of the short stories Ligeia and Morella (described above): The deathless vampire returns from the grave to claim her own. Paglia says, "Poe’s hermaphrodite Berenice, stripped of her 'sentient' teeth, is symbolically castrated. But she still lives. The vampire of nature will not stay in her grave. In Poe, sex is ritual combat, a hundred engagements with one outcome: female victory." (p. 575)

 

Paglia also notes the following short stories where Poe's characters depart from the script of the male heroine suffering at the hands of a vengeful vampire figure. For example:

 

The Masque of the Red Death: In Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death (described above), Prince Prospero is not a typical male heroine. By secluding himself in an abbey and attempting to shut out the plague, he sets himself in active opposition to the Dionysian element of chaos, plague, and death, thereby showing himself to be a champion of masculinity and Apollonianism. 

 

But in the end the Dionysian plague wins, and Prospero's defeat and punishment are all the more absolute as a result of his active opposition. Paglia says, "The Red Death ends with the annihilation of all humanity. Psychosexually, Prospero has produced this through his own vaunting masculinity, for unlike Poe’s tremulous first-person narrators, he never subordinates himself to hierarchic female personae, who are excluded from his mad revels. Hence the greater the show of masculinity in Poe, the more catastrophic the punishing reversal." (p. 577)

 

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The one story that completely goes against the concept of the male heroine is The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The story includes a locked room--reflecting the theme of Decadent closure--and a pair of murders, but the tale is a detective story involving Apollonian analysis rather than the usual Dionysian submission of the male heroine. Paglia says, "[T]he Apollonian male mind breaks free of sex and nature." Furthermore, the murderer "is an ape in brutal masculine action, on the rampage against female power." (p. 578)

 

In other words, the story serves as a kind of Apollonian revenge fantasy. All of Poe's other stories were Decadent Late Romantic, according to Paglia; but she says that Rue Morgue is fully Decadent. The murderous male orangutang becomes the vehicle by which Poe rebels and lashes out against the domination of the Dionysian maternal influence. In the Decadent manner, the chimney leading into the locked room serves as a symbolic birth canal leading to a symbolic womb; but on this occasion the chimney is jammed shut with a female corpse. Paglia concludes her analysis of the story: "Woman, who binds us into materiality, is battered and mutilated to plug up the chimney hole or maelstrom through which she steals from men in order to give birth." (pp. 578-579)

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

As was the case with Edgar Allen Poe and his stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne is a Dionysian-leaning androgyne and The Scarlet Letter is a Decadent Late Romantic novel. 

 

Paglia sees Hawthorne as a passive "male heroine" with a worshipful attraction to his saintly natural mother to the point of covert transexual imitation. Hawthorne's father died in his youth, and Paglia says that after college Hawthorne returned to his mother's home and secluded himself there for 12 years while he developed his literary skills. His mother died when he was 45 years old, and Hawthorne fell into a "brain fever" immediately upon her death. When he recovered he began work on The Scarlet Letter, completing it within a few months.

 

Paglia notes that at age 32 Hawthorne wrote a story about a minister who wears a woman's veil in "a bizarre exercise in transvestism" (The Minister's Black Veil). She says, "The gender-blurring veil is like the goddess’ robe donned by male initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Devotee merges with nature mother by transsexual impersonation." (p. 580) Paglia suggests that Hawthorne's name change while in college--from Hathorne--was an attempt to feminize his name. (p. 582)

 

The characters

The adulterous Hester Prynne is the center of the novel. Hawthorne portrays her as a "Great Mother" figure (the ancient Great Mother nature and fertility goddesses embodied the daemonic side of nature, motherhood, and femininity). Hester is a larger-than-life force, a Decadent Late Romantic goddess to be worshipped. Paglia says that Hester is "the image of Divine Maternity [...] the Catholic Madonna drummed out of Protestantism [...] a wandering goddess still bearing the mark of her Asiatic origins [...] a Byzantine Madonna or Renaissance queen." (pp. 580-581)

 

Roger Chillingworth is Hester's betrayed husband, a figure of conventional Puritan morality who is determined to root out the identity of Hester's lover. 

 

Arthur Dimmesdale is a local minister, too weak in character to admit publicly that he sinned with Hester and is the father of her infant daughter Pearl. The adulterous act between Hester and Dimmesdale is placed in the foggy past and goes largely unexamined, and Hester is content to safeguard Dimmesdale's secret if he won't reveal it himself.

 

Hawthorne as Dimmesdale

Paglia says that the minister Dimmesdale represents Hawthorne's own persona as male heroine in the Decadent Late Romantic novel. Paglia says, "With his breathless tremors and 'childish weakness,' the 'passive' Dimmesdale is a Romantic male heroine, more son than lover. Even if one accepts the adultery as a given, the sex act has permanently crippled the male, a drone stunned by the queen bee. Hester must exhort Dimmesdale, 'Preach! Write! Act!' She has energy because she is Romantic nature, while Puritan patriarchy is in decadent decline." (pp. 581-582)

 

Paglia says that the climax of the novel occurs when Hester must stand on a platform for public shaming as punishment for the crime of adultery, and Dimmesdale joins her on the platform in solidarity. However he only joins her at night, when no one is around to see them together; in the morning he is free to go back to his duties as minister of a church. Paglia sees this gesture not as any kind of public confession of culpability, but rather as the male heroine's worship of his goddess. She says, "The male joins himself to the electric chain of femaleness. Rejuvenated by a surge of female force, he declares, in effect, 'I too am born of woman!' As in The Minister’s Black Veil, a covert transsexualism is at work." (p. 582)

 

But ultimately Paglia considers this nighttime action on the part of Dimmesdale an empty gesture. She says, "The minister’s acceptance of moral responsibility?—worthless in my view if not in the day." (p. 582) Nor does his worship of his goddess-mother bear any fruit. Paglia says, "Dimmesdale is a son-lover who longs to merge with the mother but cannot." (p. 583) The male heroine is simply too passive.

 

Hester versus Puritanism

Hawthorne was very aware of his own descent from a Puritan magistrate who served as a judge in the Salem witch trials of 1692; Hawthorne felt tremendous guilt about his Puritan ancestors. (p. 581) So in The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne places Hester Prynne back in time 200 years to the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the height of Puritanism. In this manner the Dionysian goddess Hester is pitted against Apollonian Puritanism. Ultimately, though, it is no contest. Hester as Dionysian goddess is simply too monumental in stature. Paglia says, "In The Scarlet Letter, the exiled sexual persona of the saintly natural mother will defeat Hawthorne’s despotic male progenitor, who carries a church on and in his head." (p. 581)

 

In other words, the superficial theme of The Scarlet Letter is patriarchal Puritanism versus human fallibility, seemingly portrayed in a "social novel" in the vein of Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. But Paglia says that The Scarlet Letter is very different from those two other novels. Instead of being a social novel, the hidden-but-true theme of the novel is the story of Hawthorne as male heroine wrestling with a Decadent Late Romantic attraction to a powerful mother figure. Paglia says "The Scarlet Letter is a Late Romantic dream poem, stirred by inner turbulence." (p. 581)

 

Hawthorne does his best to hide his preoccupation with his mother from his readers, and perhaps from himself as well. Paglia says, "Both preface and novella are twice their optimal length. The Scarlet Letter is overwritten. Its secret preoccupation is embedded, hidden, layered with anxious afterthought." (p. 581) Elsewhere Paglia says, "For Hawthorne-as-Dimmesdale, the mother is both too near and too far. The Scarlet Letter formalizes Hawthorne’s ambivalent adult relation to his mother, who must be thrust into the mental distance for imagination’s survival." (pp. 583-584)

 

Aggressive western eye

Paglia suggests that "Hawthorne’s ambivalent adult relation to his mother" results in a bit of a love/hate relationship. Hester Prynne doesn't bow to Puritanism; but the shaming sessions on the public platform for the crime of adultery nearly break her. Paglia says that the staring crowd represents use of the "aggressive western eye," which becomes almost a form of rape.

 

In the case of Edgar Allen Poe's tales (see above), Paglia said that the aggressive western eye is used primarily as an instrument of Decadent partition. But the aggressive eye originates from the Dionysian-leaning androgyne's repressed Apollonian side and represents Apollonianism in daemonic form; it can also be used toward overtly sadistic ends. 

 

Paglia claims that Puritanism lends itself to this kind of visual daemonism: "The bareness of Puritan plain style and the absence of inherited art works starved the American eye and aggravated the dangerous power of the visual when it arrived via Romanticism. Asceticism, fearing the eye, actually sharpens it." (p. 583)

 

Returning to Hester's shaming sessions on the platform, Paglia says, "Hawthorne illustrates the sexual problematics of the visual when Hester is brought before the multitude: 'The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentred at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne.' Hester as scapegoat is the focus of projected eroticism. The thousand eyes obsessively fixed on the scarlet letter are 'concentred at her bosom' because the mother’s flowing breasts have been expelled from Puritan consciousness. There is a mass voyeurism of attraction and repulsion." (p. 583)

 

Paglia ties the use of the aggressive eye to Hawthorne himself: She says, "Coleridge and Hawthorne share a fascism of the eye." (p. 582) If Hawthorne-as-Dimmesdale is ultimately incapable of merging with the goddess Hester at night on the platform, then the aggressive Western eye becomes a way for him to distance himself from his goddess, seize upon his repressed Apollonian side, and punish her. In other words, by night Dimmesdale joins Hester on the platform to worship her as son-lover and priest of her cult; by day he is back in the crowd, one more nameless fascistic eye bearing down on her.

 

Chillingworth and Dimmesdale

The character of Chillingworth also hints at a love/hate ambience to the novel. Roger Chillingworth is the cuckolded husband, vengeful and determined to learn the name of Hester's lover; Hawthorne describes him as "misshapen," and Paglia says that he is a "Mephisto character." (p. 581)

 

Paglia describes a kind of homoerotic relationship in the interactions between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale. Paglia says that Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are practically inseparable; unable to merge with his goddess, Dimmesdale finds a mooring of sorts in his relationship with Chillingworth. Paglia says, "Dimmesdale is tied to Hester by guilt and dependency but not by sexual cathexis. His real lover is Chillingworth, to whom he is locked in sterile sadomasochistic marriage." (p. 582) 

 

Paglia suggests that they are two halves of the same character: "One gender may split into a warring pair, autoerotic and self-tormenting." (p. 582) Viewed in terms of their relation to Hester, the persecutory Chillingworth and the worshipful Dimmesdale could be said to represent another degree of love/hate ambivalence in Hawthorne's own relations with his mother.

 

In the end, the interaction of the characters is played out as an Oedipal drama of sorts. Paglia says, "Old Chillingworth is the cold, paralyzing hand of Hawthorne’s father and forefathers. Hester is his divinized mother, half Virgin, half Magdalene. Adultery is the son’s jealous charge against a mother abandoning him for his father. Hester is Antigone standing against the town, while Dimmesdale is Oedipus ruined by incest." (p. 581)