Chapter 22 - Hawthorne/Winthrop

Summary

This essay focuses on two very different authors – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Theodore Winthrop (1828–1861) – whose novels show a wide range of intense, perverse, or unruly emotional and erotic attachments. The essay contrasts these authors to highlight the emergence of forms of shame, punishment, and discipline that were becoming dominant in the mid-nineteenth century. But the essay also shows the emergence of affective and erotic communities that were collective, sharing a coded language, forms of self-protection, and cultural companionship. These novels, in other words, demonstrate sexuality’s emergence not only in terms of individual bodies but also in those collective bodies known as subcultures.