Allegories of Childhood Gender: Hawthorne and the Material Boy

The physicality of Peony is a problem for her, as it is for her author. Because Peony's boyhood corporality represents a disturbance - a mild version of Charley's problems - his gender cannot be the model for the "white" and "airy" snow-image. [...]of "Little Dafrydowndilly," Hawthorne tells us that Dafrydowndilly and the stranger "had travelled in a circle instead of a straight line," a path symbolic of the confines of boyhood masculinity and of the labor that turns boys into men and brutes (1 1:207). [...]the girl can spiritualize away the problems of materiality, as does the "lovely and lightsome little figure of Hope!" in "The Paradise of Children. According to Mann, the debate about girls and physical punishment was essentially over in the North.