Dostoyevsky's Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts by Michael Sperber

Author:Michael Sperber [Sperber, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychopathology, Literary Collections, Psychology, Russian & Former Soviet Union, General, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780761849940
Google: W8v8hfkM5skC
Publisher: University Press of America
Published: 2010-04-13T21:27:13+00:00

Outcast of the Universe

An observation in The Scarlet Letter appears applicable to the Hathorne-Hawthorne family psychodynamics:

The wrong doing of one generation lives into successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.16

The Trickster appears to surface periodically in the Hawthorne family. It can first be seen in Judge Hathorne’s devilish adjudications at the witchcraft trials. We find it at a later date in Hawthorne’s tangled fandango with the Peabody sisters; in his craftiness, projected into the personality of Wakefield. It resurfaces in the presence of this attribute in the character of his son Julian, whose incarceration in the United States Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta corresponds, in some way, to his father’s mental dungeon under the attic eaves in Salem, forty years before.

Each male descendant of this lineage was, in one way or another, like Wakefield, an “Outcast of the Universe.”

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