The Blithedale Romance (1852) was the third of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s four major American romances, after The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Unique among Hawthorne’s novels, it is the only one to feature a first-person narrator, the urbane and sybaritic Miles Coverdale, minor poet and inveterate voyeur. It is also the most autobiographical of Hawthorne’s novels, based in part on his experiences at Brook Farm, an experimental utopian commune. Contemporary reaction to the novel was mixed: George Eliot called it “unmistakably the finest production of genius in either hemisphere” in many years, while Emerson called it “that disagreeable story” (Idol, 203–204; Miller, 367).
Resistance to the novel may have stemmed from its technical innovativeness. Although Hawthorne designated his novel as a “romance,” its unreliable narrator, polytonality, and unresolved plot appear to anticipate certain features of literary modernism, and its influence can be detected in such later novels as Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
The plot concerns the efforts of a group of New England intellectuals to establish a farming community founded upon socialist principles that seeks to provide a utopian space outside of the culture of market capitalism and its emphasis on self-interest and competition. In the words of Miles Coverdale, “We sought our profit by mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy . . . or winning it by selfish competition with a neighbor” (19). However, as the novel progresses, the Blithedalers find their community developing into a replica of the American society they sought to leave behind. The members seek out the society of others within their own class, women are restricted to domestic labor, and Blithedale is forced to compete with neighboring farms in order to survive.
Most crucially, Blithedale is haunted by history. One of the first decisions made by the Blithedalers as a community is to reject the Native American name of the land on which they are living, on the grounds that the word is “harsh, ill-connected, and interminable” (37). But such Emersonian renunciations of the past have little lasting force. The Blithedalers remain painfully aware that their new Eden is built on soil stolen from Native Americans by European settlers with utopian dreams of their own—on land “stained by genocide and already replete with the dust of earlier failures” (Tanner, xxviii).
As the novel progresses, sexual jealousy and self-interest threaten to tear apart a community already crumbling under the weight of its ideological contradictions. A love triangle forms between three Blithedalers: Hollingsworth, a philanthropist who secretly plans to transform the commune into a colony for the reform of criminals; the anemic yet captivating Priscilla; and the brilliant Zenobia, a celebrated writer and scintillating conversationalist modeled in part on the writer Margaret Fuller. Zenobia is described as a “high-spirited woman, bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex” (2). It is one of the many ironies of The Blithedale Romance that this independent woman should fall in love with the misogynistic and egomaniacal Hollingsworth, who is seeking the resources of a rich wife to underwrite his philanthropic schemes.
Through all this, Miles Coverdale adopts a position of panoptic specular detachment. Camping out in a tree-top hermitage, he converts the passions of his fellow Blithedalers into his own private theater. Yet despite his efforts to remain a detached observer, Coverdale finds himself irresistibly drawn to three of his fellow communalists, and in particular to Hollingsworth. Like Zenobia and Priscilla, Coverdale is attracted by Hollingsworth’s “all-devouring egotism” (71), which feeds, vampire-like, on the energy and admiration of others.
Coverdale eventually flees Blithedale out of fear of being “penetrated” by the philanthropist’s “magnetism” (134). Animal magnetism, or mesmerism, is the novel’s central metaphor for human relationships, as well as a plot device. (Another character, the sinister Westervelt, is a professional mesmerist.) Hawthorne was horrified by mesmerism, perceiving it as a monstrous violation of an individual’s will by another. Yet human interaction generally, and erotic relationships specifically, tend to be marked by such asymmetry in The Blithedale Romance, and the novel suggests it is impossible for the modern subject to escape the dynamics of dominance and submission, not even in love or friendship, not even in utopia.
At the end of the novel, the passions at Blithedale explode in a catastrophe that dismantles the Blithedale experiment: the drowning of Zenobia. Zenobia’s death, as narrated by Coverdale, is shrouded in such obscurity that some critics (like Louise DeSalvo) have argued that murder, and not suicide, is suggested—a thesis that would make Blithedale a detective story without a solution.
Coverdale’s strange “confession” in the final chapter has added to the speculation. The rhetoric of the confession is much wilder than the disclosure warrants, leaving the impression that Coverdale withholds more than he reveals. Regardless, the excessive brutality of Zenobia’s demise has suggested to some that the novel punishes her for her feminism. Like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Zenobia is dark-haired, passionate, and rebellious—and suffers for it. But the fair-haired, virginal, and submissive Priscilla fares hardly better. When last seen, she is trapped in a joyless marriage to a remorseful Hollingsworth. And Miles Coverdale ends his days alone in his bachelor rooms, a failed poet, reflecting half-satirically, half-regretfully on the failure of the Blithedale project.
It is a somber conclusion. As Edwin Miller writes, The Blithedale Romance “sounds in its desperateness and ennui more ominous chords of disintegration and futility” than any of Hawthorne’s other novels (367). In a novel that dramatizes the limits of individual agency and questions the possibility of creating a viable space outside of the dominant culture, it is perhaps fitting that there proves to be for the fiercely independent Zenobia no room of her own except the grave.
SOURCES
DeSalvo, Louise. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Edited by Tony Tanner. New York: Oxford, 1998.
Idol, John L., Jr., and Buford Jones. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Miller, Edwin Haviland. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1991.
Tanner, Tony. “Introduction.” In Hawthorne: A Life, edited by Brenda Wineapple, vii–xli. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis
Analysis of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Última 
Analysis of Richard Wright’s Black Boy 
Analysis of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor 
Analysis of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep
You must be logged in to post a comment.