The abject subject and the other’s gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The hollow of the three hills
The abject subject and the other’s gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The hollow of the three hills

Summary/Abstract: This paper reads Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story The Hollow of the Three Hills through key concepts from Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. I employ Lacan's notion of the Other and Kristeva's notion of the abject to discuss the suffering that the female subject undergoes in the story. I argue that the young lady's obsession with an implicit sense of guilt places her in a deadlock and turns her into an abject subject who embraces death as an escape from the impossible demands of the Other. Within the same line of thought, I suggest that the text, as a sociocultural product, displays unconscious, conflicting forces that stand at opposite poles in their demands from individuals.

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