Romance And The Construction Of Anglo-Saxon American Identity

The present study aims to explore the role that Nathaniel Hawthorne's romance plays in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon American identity.In recent years,scholars have noticed the aesthetic and political values of Hawthorne's romance,but not too much attention has been paid to the relationship between romance,race and the construction of national identity.What's more,current studies on Hawthorne and race mainly focus on the slavery issue and the blacks,while other racial issues and racial Others in Hawthorne's works still need further exploration.Based on these issues and existing studies,this study will combine Hawthorne's major romances and his early and later writings which are less familiar yet closely related to the racial issues,and explore how Hawthorne deals with the Indians,the Europeans and the mixed bloods with the strategy of romance so as to construct a stable national identity.Chapter One mainly focuses on the role that the Indian Other plays in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon American identity.Hawthorne himself dislikes the savage Indians,but he objects the violent removal of the government.He believes it is an imitation of the savagery of the Indians and thus a racial transgression.That is the reason why Hawthorne imagines Hannah's death as an alternative ending to "The Duston Family." Hannah's imitation of the Indians'violence and bloodthirstiness casts doubt on her whiteness.Despite his objection to the violent removal of the Indians,Hawthorne engages in the construction of the removal discourse of the dominant society by depicting the disappearing Indians in both the past and the nineteenth-century America in his literary works.In addition,Hawthorne also tries to deconstruct the Indian culture to eliminate their threat to the white people.In this stage,although Hawthorne notices the limits of romance,he still firmly believes in the power of this literary strategy.Chapter Two explores how Hawthorne stabilizes the Anglo-Saxon American identity by rejecting or marginalizing the Europeans in his English romance and Italian romance.In The American Claimant Manuscripts,Hawthorne depicts the American claimants in England.The protagonists will never claim their English heritage,whether it is because they give it up or because they make an invalid claim since the very beginning.No matter how painfully they struggle between the Old World and the New World,their American patriotism tends to get the upper hand in the end.In his Italian romance,Hawthorne portrays two Italian Others,Miriam and Donatello.In the romance,the two American protagonists manage to marginalize the Italian Others though Otherization and racialization.They also constrain them with religion and art to stabilize their Anglo-Saxon American identity.In this stage,Hawthorne clearly senses that the power of romance to confront reality is declining.Chapter Three aims to examine how Hawthorne suppresses the mixed blood other for the construction of the Anglo-Saxon American identity in the.unfinished American romances.The Septimius manuscripts are written during the Civil War,and thus are a response to the impending racial mixture.In the two romances,Hawthorne points out that the mixed blood phobia,the mixed bloods' internalized racist ideas of the dominant society,their self-abasement and their atavism all demonstrate that assimilation is not promising and that it is still not the right time for racial mixture in America.As a result,Hawthorne designs the death of Aunt Nashoba and Septimius' departure from America.Considering the background of this romance,it is easy to see Hawthorne's intention to stabilize Anglo-Saxon American identity that is threatened by the potential racial mixture after the Civil War.Despite the temporary success of Hawthorne's racial imagination,romance gradually loses its power because of the war.Based on the analysis above,it argues that romance is an important strategy for Hawthorne to construct the Anglo-American identity.By excluding,repressing or marginlizing the racial Other,Hawthorne's romance attempts to construct an Anglo-American-dominant world on the textual level to relieve the identity crisis and consolidate the national identity.However,with the increase of free slaves and large number of immigrants flooding into the country,such national identity,which is based on racial repression and white homogeneity,is doomed to failure,and Hawthorne's racial imaginary gradually loses its power to confront the social reality of the nineteenth-century America.