Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

98in anticipation of Derridean theory. The text exposes the instability of the boundary-makingprocess that creates identity. Derrida points out that the invisible prohibition on which anycultural or social system rests is "a pure, fictive and unstable, ungraspable limit. One crosses it inattaining it … before the prohibition, it is not incest; forbidden, it cannot become incest exceptthrough the recognition of the prohibition" (Of Grammatology 267). The father's prohibitionaprohibition that is inscribed in the Puritan model of active masculinity and imaged in the primalscene of writing marks a perimeter, but, as Derrida directs us to think, perimeters are intrinsicallyleaky; while they assign identities, they are also the space where identity melts. Hawthorne stagesthe ghosts of his ancestors criticizing and shaming him, dismissing him as an “idler” and a “writerof story books” (9). The maternal is disavowed and by extension the effeminate is treated asabject.Hawthorne’s mourning of his ancestors brings back the ghost/father and fuels its requestor rather command: that the sonhere Hawthornedo what the mother, as represented byHester, who is one could say, extraneous to the “The Custom House,” will not, legitimize thefather and the patriarchal order. Hawthorne’s Father epitomizes the absorbing father figure of thepre-Oedipal stage. It could be said that the effeminate son, the mere writer, can redeem himselfby disseminating the will of the Father. Whereas the Fathers had their bibles and their swords, theSon has his pen. The outcome of Hawthorne’s fear of castration is his submission to the realityprinciple. His entry into the Symbolic Order or the language system requires the submission tothe rules of languagethe Law-of-the-Father, which is at the center of the system. To berecognized as an eminent literary figure, Hawthorne submits to the law of his literaryancestorPue. By this logic, Hawthorne’s primal scene is also Pue’s. Hawthorne’s