Dearest Beloved The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family [Paperback]

The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthornefor their contemporaries a model of true love and married happinesswas also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.

T. Walter Herbertis University Scholar and Brown Professor of English at Southwestern University. He is the author ofMoby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled(1977) andMarquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization(1980).