Bleeding Passports: The Ideology of Woman's Heart in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Freeman and Cooke

Authors

  • Marjorie Stone Dalhousie University

Abstract

"For its own sake, if it will do no more, the world should throw open all its avenues to the passport of a woman's bleeding heart." This is the only resolution to women's wrongs that Miles Coverdale, the narrator of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, can offer. Hawthorne's ambivalent response to the ideology of woman's heart is more complex than Coverdale's but it remains fundamentally conservative, like the response of another New England writer, Rose Terry Cooke. Hawthorne and Cooke share ideological assumptions about gender subverted by Mary Wilkins Freeman, a third New England writer whose works still have not received the recognition they merit.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Downloads

Published

1989-10-10

Issue

Section

Original Research