Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

102the sense of a return of the repressed. It works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger withinthe subject’s own mental topography. The imaginings issuing from the presence of astranger has nothing to do with fantasy strictly speaking. (173)The narrator is caught between two inclinations: to keep the secret (the project) of his lost lovedones, or to try disclose the secret altogether. This is also paralleled by a desire to recover the lostmother. This unthwarted desire has to remain unknown because the narrator’s patriarchal projectof re-writing the colonial history out of residues. These residues, as the narrator of “The Custom-House” argues, render history inaccessible. Such inaccessibility allows the narrator toimaginatively reconstruct this history while hiding some elements from the scene of writing. EricSavoy argues that “Hawthorne seeks connection to the Puritan fathers by writing his participationin the transhistorical project of surveying and containing women’s resistant energies” (398). Therepresentation of Hester, albeit misogynic, tends toward the absent mother. Participating in thereconstruction of the Puritan project, Hawthorne keeps this secret blotted out in order to belegitimized by the fathers. This is the lie of Hawthorne who, while withholding some secrets fromthe Puritan fathers, is deceived by the phantoms of the dead fathers. While Hawthorne succumbsto the affective maneuvers of prosopopeia and welcomes the revenant in order to fulfill andsustain the filial duty, he fails to sever his connection to the past (the maternal connection)afailure that stages the writing subject as melancholic. Such melancholia, epitomized by theindefinite Thing that is cast upon the split ego, is explicated by the narrative’s investment inchiasmus and prosopopeia, or rather the will-to-prosopopeia. Essentially, the phantom of theCustom House stages the impossibility of representing the past and the inevitable failure ofmourning, a failure that is worsened by the phantom’s lies.