Hawthorne’s perspectival perversity: What if “Wakefield” were (about) a woman?; or, credo quia absurdum
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Date
2013
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
Although “Wakefield” opens as a leisurely mnemonic act, it turns into an intensely emotional affair.
However, the stance of moral indignation and, indeed, condemnation adopted in many readings of this
classic tale seems to be a monological trap, an interpretive ride along Einbahnstrasse. The present close
re-reading draws on the combined appreciation of perversity as (i) formal figuration in which the bearings
of the original are reversed, (ii) attitudinal disposition to proceed against the weight of evidence
(the so-called ‘being stubborn in error’). Building on this logic, the paper offers a transcriptive anti-type
response to Hawthorne’s title. It is meant as a detour of understanding and a reclamation of a seemingly
obvious relational and denotative proposition. Inasmuch as “Wakefield” is a distinctive rhetorical
performance, foundationally a story about story-telling, its title can be naturalized as identifying the
story-teller. Even if this does not come across as lucius ordo, it is argued that the order of reappropriative
and be-longing signification is that of Mrs. rather than – as is commonly believed – that
of Mr. Wakefield. Informed by object permanence and a peculiar looking bias, “Wakefield” proves to
be her-tale rather than his-story. As a secret sharer and a would be-speaking gaze, the wife turns out to
be a structural and existential pivot of the narrative. More broadly, Mrs. Wakefield can be appreciated
as coarticulator of a ventriloquistic logos and choreographer of a telescopic parallactic vision. Unintentional
challenge to both the heresy of paraphrase and the aesthetics of astonishment, this is ultimately
to proffer a radical Shakespearean/Kantian re-cognition that in certain spheres there obtains
nothing absolutely ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’, and it is only a particular perspectival discourse that may
make it so.
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Keywords
narrative framing, phenomenology, female gaze, motivated irrationality, Prodigal Son, Penelope
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 48.1(2013), pp. 45-84
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0081-6272