You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Of all the principal female characters in our national literature,” Harold Bloom (2004) opines, “Hester Prynne is clearly the central figure” (p. 4). What makes Bloom's statement more noteworthy is that he was arguably the most influential literary critic of the second half of the 20th century. David B. Diamond quotes Bloom's remark on the opening page of Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne's Romances, a book that examines an overlooked subject, narrative gaps, in The Scarlet Letter and elsewhere in his fiction.
Diamond's challenge to bring new insight to an iconic novel becomes more daunting in light of the vast psychological commentary on The Scarlet Letter—and because of the highly contentious nature of Hawthorne scholarship, where literary critics battle not only with each other but also, bizarrely, with their own earlier judgments. At the beginning of his career, the U.C. Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews wrote a bold psychoanalytic study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Sins of the Fathers (1966), a title filled with prescient irony that later came back to haunt the author. Crews' early writings reveal his belief that Freud was a heroic figure who, single-handedly, created an explanatory system that was a master key to unlock all human knowledge. The image of Freud as a Faustian figure appears throughout The Sins of the Fathers, in which Crews uses psychoanalysis to cast light on the oedipal mysteries of Hawthorne and his conflicted fictional characters. Only Freud, in Crews' view, could expose the meaning of Hawthorne's fraught feelings toward his ancestors, ambivalence that appears in his most powerful stories. Crews later changed his mind and became the country's leading Freud basher.
Fortunately, Diamond does not fire “crews missiles” at his readers. A former assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and now a psychoanalyst in private practice, he uses
a classic Freudian approach in his literary discussions, admitting that other psyc