The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

by Lauren Berlant

Examining the complex relationships between the political, popular, sexual, and textual interests of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, Lauren Berlant argues that Hawthorne mounted a sophisticated challenge to America's collective fantasy of national unity. She shows how Hawthorne's idea of citizenship emerged from an attempt to adjudicate among the official and the popular, the national and the local, the collective and the individual, utopia and history.

At the core of Berlant's work is a three-part study of The Scarlet Letter , analyzing the modes and effects of national identity that characterize the narrator's representation of Puritan culture and his construction of the novel's political present tense. This analysis emerges from an introductory chapter on American citizenship in the 1850s and a following chapter on national fantasy, ranging from Hawthorne's early work "Alice Doane's Appeal" to the Statue of Liberty. In her conclusion, Berlant suggests that Hawthorne views everyday life and local political identities as alternate routes to the revitalization of the political and utopian promises of modern national life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory

278 pages, Hardcover

First published August 13, 1991

About the author

Lauren Berlant was an English Professor at the University of Chicago, where they taught since 1984. Berlant received their Ph.D. from Cornell University. They wrote and taught on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.

Reviews

[Declan · Rating 5 out of 5]

baller!!!!! this ROCKED thank you Lauren Berlant once again. i now see why we're all reading The Scarlet Letter, it only took twenty years of school.

here we go: there is no totalizing American national identity. Nathaniel Hawthorne proposes the Puritan origins of the United States to be that unifying identity within The Scarlet Letter and My Native Land (rather than the Revolutionary War, as was the faulty, popular center). Berlant uses these texts to show how Puritan law struggled to identify women and instead created a homosocial society, where women’s bodies are subject to legal scrutiny (Hester Prynne, the Statue of Liberty).

[Frances · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite focusing her entire book on Nathaniel Hawthorne (who certainly deserves the attention), Berlant is one of few 19th Century American literary critics who makes extensive use of the body to offer a subtle and unique analysis of national subject formation, moving a bit outside of catchphrases like "performativity" in order to think about identity in a different way. Hawthorne’s writing, according to Berlant, is symptomatic of what she calls the “national symbolic”, defined as “the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces, and also refers to the ‘law’ in which the accident of birth within a geographic political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history,” (20). Like many of her contemporaries, Berlant is concerned with how the varied and often conflictive discursive practices of national narratives find ways to cohere; for her, this cohesion occurs primarily at the nexus of the body, which becomes the signifier of national identity, the key through which the national subject is allowed to become literate in the codes of the nation.
In short, I found Berlant’s exegesis of Hawthorne impressive, diverse, and incredibly useful as a model for the kind of scholarship I’d like to pursue. My one critique stems from the pseudo-Marxist lurking in the back of my mind that often pops out when reading studies regarding the body and affect—how is it possible to discuss the body as text and textually represented without discussing labor? Berlant goes so far to emphasize the relation between the bodily boundaries and territorial boundaries, particularly as both of these are established through a variety of mnemotechniques (a term she borrows from Nietzsche), but fails to recognize that the right to labor about the land marks a very specific relationship of the body to the land that is at the very heart of early American identity formation (this as a part of Locke’s understanding of the right to property ownership that many accused Jefferson of plagiarizing directly when writing the “Declaration of Independence”). What kinds of fantasies does that procure, particularly as different types of labor are so intricately tied to the subject’s relationship to various fantasies of national belonging?

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 3 out of 5]

O livro de Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, analisa a obra do autor estadunidense Hawthorne, criador de A Letra Escarlate e outros livros, para entender como sua descrição da América ressoa na vida cotidiana dos cidadãos dos Estados Unidos. Ao ler este livro, não me interessou a análise da obra de Hawthorne, mas o conceito que a autora faz de "simbólico nacional" e de "corpo icônico", ambos bastante importantes para que eu possa tecer minha análise sobre super-heróis em minha tese, uma vez que super-heróis são produtos originados e arraigados na cultura de superioridade e exepcionalidade estadunidense. Achei os conceitos bastante interessantes e que podem ser aplicados em outros produtos culturais dos Estados Unidos que possuem dominância massiva e global e analisar quais as consequências dessa dominação em sociedades do Sul Global.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I found little that stirred my imagination in the last two chapters in regards to my own scholarship on citizenship and queer temporality, Berlant does an excellent job extrapolating both the construction of the Statue of Liberty and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, along with a select few other works. This is a case where a work of literary criticism transcends the potential siloed nature of the genre into a much larger interrogation of culture via Hawthorne as vehicle for guiding analytical thought about hegemony and political power. Berlant’s concept of the National Fantasy as a myth that relegates identity is fascinating, and the way she builds in Foucault directly and indirectly makes this as much a text about how disciplinary systems work as it is Berlant’s contemplation of how Hawthorne constructs historiography through (some of) his narratives.

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lauren Berlant's book might be explained as an examination of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Yet Berlant’s interest lies not ultimately in Hawthorne’s text but in the relationship between the National Symbolic and counter-memory. She is interested in the way the body functions in the relationship of the citizen/subject to everyday life, where multiple meanings proliferate and disrupt the National Symbolic. Hawthorne’s text emerges here as a mediation on such issues and the relationship between gender and citizenship, as well as official discourses and everyday practices. I know that I will need to read her book at least once more, and that when I read it again, I will understand her ideas in different ways than I do now. It is not a book I would suggest to someone hoping to understand The Scarlet Letter more. Nor is it the most accessible book. However, I think Berlant’s book models a methodology I can only aspire towards. She combines a critical/theoretical approach with historical context and close readings. While her reading ultimately leads one (or at least me) to rethink the novel, it also leads to a reassessment of citizenship and the very construction of the nation that will be useful even to those who could care less about Nathaniel Hawthorne. The most brilliant part of the book (in my humble opinion) was her opening discussion on the Statue of Liberty. This may only be because it was the most accessible to me and the most useful towards my own work. She was also very interested in the relationship between America’s utopic promise and America’s political messiness. I have a feeling that her ideas about this will one day be very useful to me – especially as I grapple with utopic urges in several of the novels I am reading. Her work left me with much to think about and a desire to re-read it in a few months or possibly a few years.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over educated and masturbatory: two adjectives very apt for this book. I consider myself a relatively smart person, but dayum woman, speak English!

Also, I hate you.

(But in all seriousness, some of the stuff, like 15% of it, is really interesting . . . once I figured out all I needed to do was read the first and last couple of paragraphs of each chapter.)

[Mills College Library]

813.3 B514 1991