Feathertop

Abstract: The young Ellen Langton stares at Fanshawe, the eponymous protagonist of Hawthorne's first novel, marvelling at his beauty; the Minister Hooper prevents anyone from seeing his face, hidden behind a black veil; Feathertop, believing he cuts a dashing figure, stares at himself in the mirror, discovering, to his horror, that he is merely the mirage of a man, a witch's illusion; Giovanni stares at lush, poisonous Beatrice Rappacini in her equally beautiful and deadly garden, little realizing that her father and Rappacini's own scientific rival, Baglioni, stares at Giovanni staring at her; Chillingworth triumphantly stares at the exposed flesh of sleeping, guilt-ridden Dimmesdale: these examples of the function of the gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne's work metonymically symbolize numerous important issues that inform his oeuvre. Hawthorne's intensely, provocatively visual literary work invites cinematic comparisons. Joining numerous critiques in the field of film criticism, this essay challenges Laura Mulvey's well-known theory of the male gaze, using Hawthorne's work as an example of representation that complicates gendered subject positions vis-a-vis the gaze. (1) In his work, Hawthorne makes it impossible to assign clear positions of dominance and submission. In so doing, he offers valuable contributions to our understanding of the construction and organization of gender and sexuality in the antebellum United States. By rendering male subjects as the objects as well as the wielders of the gaze, Hawthorne insists that we view men as possible objects of erotic contemplation, thereby beckoning queer and feminist analysis. If the radical nature of Hawthorne's work lies, in part, in his insistence on rendering male figures the object of multiple gazes, Hawthorne's 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance poses a theoretical dilemma, since its protagonist, the cynical poet Miles Coverdale, clearly wields the gaze: one might even say his chief agenda is eluding the gaze of others by gazing at them first. In this essay, I examine the psychic costs of wielding the gaze, arguing that Hawthorne demonstrates the considerable potential personal risks involved in the avid desire to look, which he never treats as an act or symbol of power but, instead, as the very evidence of the debilitated fragility of the gazer. (21) am not arguing that Hawthorne depicts the phallic gazer as a victim who should be pitied for the patriarchal power he must embody and enact through gazing; this essay eschews any special pleading for the anxious condition of aggrieved American manhood. As Suzanne R. Stewart, in a study of late nineteenth-century masochism and manhood, writes, "The problem with so many postmodern theories of the subject is the elevation of the failure of subjectivity into a general condition of all subjectivity, a failure that is then celebrated as subversive." (3) The subversive energy of The Blithedale Romance lies in the manner whereby Hawthorne exposes Coverdale's act of seeming masculine dominance--wielding the gaze, voyeuristically devouring what he sees--as indicative of a hopelessly unsuccessful embodiment of male power. The novel can be read as a critique of developing antebellum forms and theories of American masculinity; an evocation of queer threats to it; and as a phobically defensive treatment of the issues of effeminacy that personally plagued Hawthorne. Moreover, and more pressingly, I will argue that The Blithedale Romance provides a particular theorization of heteronormative masculinity's relationship to the male gaze. I compare constructions and theorizations of the voyeuristic gaze in Hawthorne, Freud, Lacan, and Alfred Hitchcock, artists and thinkers who all use the voyeuristic gaze as a means of both establishing and deconstructing normative models of patriarchal power. My chief focus is, however, Hawthorne, and in bringing in psychoanalytic and cinematic perspectives, I mean primarily to illuminate his work, particularly in the ways in which his ineluctable conservatism competes with a potential radicalism--his phobic demonizations with a heroic and embattled sensitivity. …

Abstract: The political campaigns we have endured over the past decade offer an inviting context for examining Hawthorne's 1852 campaign biography, The Life of Franklin Pierce, as if it were fiction. Early reviewers did so. The Salem Register entitled its review "Hawthorne's New Romance" (Idol 227), the Springfield Republican called it Hawthorne's "best" fiction, revealing a "greater degree of inventive genius than any of his previous works" (Idol 231), and Horace Mann famously commented that, if Hawthorne represented Pierce as "either a great or a brave man," the biography would be the "greatest work of fiction" he ever wrote (quoted in Wineapple 262). Hawthorne himself helped promote the generic confusion by advising his publisher, Ticknor and Fields, to advertise the volume as "HAWTHORNE'S Life of GENERAL PIERCE" (16:588-89), and after the fact he would admit to Horatio Bridge that, "though the story is true, yet it took a romancer to do it" (16:605). Scott Casper has argued, in fact, that Pierce was the "first presidential candidate completely created by his biographers and partisans" (216-17), and so many of Pierce's presidential qualities seem rooted in Hawthorne's fiction that the biography might be thought a sequel to "Feathertop," which predates it by less than a year. Hawthorne creates another straw man, so to speak--and runs him for President! Although Hawthorne claimed in his preface that he would not "voluntarily have undertaken the work here offered to the public" (23:273), he did volunteer for the job. Pierce was nominated by the Democrats on the forty-ninth ballot at their Baltimore convention the first week of June in 1852. The day after hearing the news Hawthorne wrote to Pierce, congratulating him on the nomination. Although he hedged a bit and even suggested an alternative biographer, he coyly expressed his interest in the job. "It has occurred to me," he told Pierce, "that you might have some thoughts of getting me to write the necessary biography" (16:545). Hawthorne felt free to volunteer because he had just finished The Blithedale Romance, which he began in late November 1851, shortly after he moved from the Berkshires into a rented house in West Newton. He finished the romance on May first, 1852, bought and moved into the Wayside in Concord at the beginning of June, and began collecting materials for the campaign biography immediately, even though he did not actually begin writing it until July 25. (1) Blithedale remained on Hawthorne's mind throughout the summer, as he anticipated its publication, which occurred on July 14 (16:566), and its sales receipts. When I read the Pierce biography for the first time, I noted many parallels between the biography and The Blithedale Romance. Since Hawthorne wrote the novel first and before he could have had any inkling that he would write the biography, any influence works in an unexpected direction. It is not that Hawthorne plays Coverdale to Pierce's Hollingsworth, for example, at least not in any simple sense. Rather, I think, Hawthorne recycled features of both characters--as well as the tension between them--in his portrait of Pierce. (2) I am especially interested in the "manly" imagery Hawthorne employs in each text and how that imagery reveals his manner of negotiating 19th-century gender politics in a forum more public and politically more volatile than any for which he had yet written. What greater challenge and opportunity than creating a man who would be President? More important, what model of manhood would be most politically marketable to a male electorate? Because the Whig and Democratic platforms were "nearly identical," with both supporting the Compromise of 1850 and the controversial Fugitive Slave Law (Wallner 211), a portrait of the candidate as a man--a "character," in both senses of the word--was all the more important. (3) As Peter Wallner notes, the Whigs started a negative campaign against Pierce's character as soon as he accepted the nomination, attacking him for being a gambler, drunk, and coward (Wallner 212). …

Abstract: Atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition is an important issue of global climate change and it will significantly affect plant growth and reproduction, resulting in damage to ecological systems. However, little attention has been given to the effects of this factor on plant reproductive strategies. We investigated how variation in atmospheric N deposition affects the reproductive strategy of Chloris virgata (feathertop Rhodes grass). We simulated atmospheric N deposition to evaluate the trade-off between seed size and seed number, as well as its effects on offspring vigour. We found significant negative correlations between seed size and seed number per spike in the control and 20.0 g N m–2 treatments, as well as between seed size and seed number per plant in the control treatment. Seed number and seed weight per spike behaved similarly and were significantly lower in the control and 20.0 g N m–2 treatments than in the other N supply treatments. Spike number and seed yield behaved similarly, and the greatest gains in these values occurred from 2.5 to 20.0 g N m–2. Seed size reached its maximum values at low and high N levels, whereas seed N concentrations increased with N level. Although the germination percentage remained stable under different N levels, the highest germination rate occurred in the control treatment. Our findings showed that simulated atmospheric N deposition affected the reproductive pattern and seed vigour of C. virgata.

Abstract: akefield\" (1835) and \"Feathertop\" (1852) are improbable tales that nevertheless engage our belief in their own peculiar veracity. The narrators of these tales draw authority from conventions of moralized prose and romance that allow as probable what we do not expect within our everyday experience nor, by extension, in novelistic modes of fiction. We tentatively accept the narrator's claim in the earlier tale that a meaningful character will emerge from his announced imaginative activity because explicit fictionalizing is a familiar convention of romance and because explicit narrative judgment is a familiar convention of moralized prose. Likewise, we tentatively accept the narrator's claim in the last of Hawthorne's short fictions that inhaling a magical pipe brings a scarecrow to life, and that this show of life speaks to our own, because we grant to certain kinds of fiction latitude for such unnatural events. But these narrators also call into question the authority of their claims for the truths of moralized prose and romance as well as the authority of our own perceptions and