A Zoom link is available here.

Meeting ID de réunion: 444 302 9120
Password: 73957

Justyna Fruzińska (University of Lodz): Models of Masculinity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Prose

Abstract: The paper will focus on the representation of male characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose in the context of nineteenth-century normative models of masculinity. I will compare Hawthorne’s men with the cultural expectations of the era, which included heteronormativity, Jacksonian individualism, emotional self-control, and what I term the double requirement of male sociality: compulsory homosociality (a concept developed in the context of 19th-century American writers by David Greven) and imperative participation in the public life. Given that almost none of Hawthorne’s male characters meet these criteria, I will examine whether they are represented as failing in their manliness, or whether the writer promotes a different, more subversive model of masculinity challenging 19th‑century norms.

Justyna Fruzińska is Associate Professor at the University of Lodz, Poland, where she teaches courses on American literature, culture, and history. Her publications include Nineteenth-Century Visions of Race: British Travel Writing about America (2022) and Emerson Goes to the Movies: Individualism in Walt Disney Company’s Post-1989 Animated Films (2014) as well as articles on American popular culture, Transcendentalism, travel writing, and Polish poetry. She serves as Topic Editor for Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, and is part of the editorial team of Polish Journal for American Studies. She is a graduate of the Institute of Jewish Studies Paideia in Stockholm as well as a member of the Association for Cultural Studies, British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Polish Association for American Studies.

Anna Shamtenko (Sorbonne Université): Anatomy and Masculinity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”

Abstract: Surgery and dissection are omnipresent in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” despite the fact that barely any touching actually takes place between the tale’s physician and patient figures. Yet, through Aylmer’s, the protagonist’s, deployment of the medical gaze, every instance of looking and speech-utterance in the text participates in something akin to a touch-free dissection, gradually cadaverising Georgiana, his wife and figurative patient, long before her death. I will argue that Aylmer’s anatomical excavations of his wife’s flesh are implicated in an Enlightenment project of racial cleansing, which starts with Georgiana’s eponymous birthmark being framed as a lesion of disease that bears many names, among which the most concerning are death, femininity, and racial otherness. Yet, instead of endorsing this project, I will argue that the tale, in all its subtlety, actually executes a critique thereof. The text repeatedly hints at the fact that the real fatal illness that festers therein is not Georgiana’s birthmark but the white male scientist’s phobia of embodiment. In the talk, I will attempt to demonstrate that it is this monomaniacal obsession with discorporation and racial purity that produces a “defect” on Georgiana’s face where there was none before, leaving Aylmer preoccupied with their collective failure to attain the summit of whiteness’ racial and gender aesthetics.

Anna Shmatenko is a third-year PhD student at Sorbonne University. Her research focuses on liminal states between life and death in the literature and medical archives of the nineteenth-century United States. She has published an article in Transatlantica on material spectres in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar and has an upcoming chapter on the disabled body in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which will be published as part of the “Intercalaires” collection with Nanterre University Press. She also gave a paper at the International Poe and Hawthorne Conference in Paris in July 2025.

---

---