
                           20050619.00

             Notes on Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance

     The dictionary states that blithe means carefree, lacking
due concern. Given Hawthorne's Emersonian respect for meaning,
I assume that the farm's name: Blithedale, means what it says.

     Hawthorne was an author who wrote for a living and was
concerned about the approval of the reading public, which liked
fanciful, mysterious and erotic themes.  The Blithedale Romance
was written as entertainment for a conscience-stricken nation in
the throes of turmoil over slavery.  Under these circumstances,
whether so intended by its author or not, the Blithedale Romance
became a study in ethics, and Blithedale itself appears as
nothing less than a laboratory experiment in the same subject.
Ethics is not only concerned with what one does, it is also
concerned with who one is.  One may find ones identity as an
individual or one may find ones identity as a member of the
community.  If one identifies with the community one is proud to
be an American, like Nathaniel Hawthorne.  if one feels a need to
be oneself, one is ashamed to be an American, like Henry David
Thoreau.

     Blithedale was an expression of transcendentalism, which
spelled freedom from Unitarian orthodoxy: but freedom to what
ends? "Frei wozu?"  Freedom to live in a new way; to give to
society, to nature and to the world a new interpretation, a
freedom which soon impinged on, which was soon limited by the way
the world really was.  Therefore one would build society anew.
One would start from the beginning, with a clean slate.  The most
immediate and chief injustice, appeared to be between those who
toiled, and those who did not.  In this sense Blithedale was the
most immediate and the most direct, honest and persuasive answer
to slavery, to servitude of any kind, to the subjugation of one
man by another.  That Hawthorne did not see it that way is one of
the more remarkable aspects of this novel.

     If one takes the Transcendentalists and Brook Farm
seriously, Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance implies a restatement
of Kant's question, What must I do?  (Was muss ich tun?)  The
immediate answer, of course, is in the instructions given by
Silas Foster: pull weeds, hoe corn, milk cows.  But Silas
Foster's answer was ultimately satisfactory to none of his
guests.

     In the end, Brook Farm did not provide the answer, and I
infer from Hawthorne's writing, that he himself stopped asking
the question.  My own conclusion is that this question is
unanswerable; in a manner analogous to that of the physicists'
uncertainty principle, it is ultimately indeterminate.  The
indeterminacy of ethical imperatives is suggested already by
Kant's own answers to his question.  Kant's answers, the three
variations of the categorical imperative are illusory, in that we
cannot legislate universally, and even mutually contradictory on
the face of them. We depend on each other as means to our own
individual existence, which is incompatible with our living
solely "for others".  Given the contradictions that are the
residue of Kantian ethics, Hawthorne was faced with the question
whether the target of ethics is to secure ones own (eternal)
happiness, the happiness of ones associates, one or more persons
or whether the target of the ethically valuable action is the
greatest good of the greatest number on an expanded scale, and
expansion which itself raises (insoluble) questions.  And the
Blithedale community itself may be construed as having implicit
in its design a solution to this problem by equating or
reconciling by resolving or suspending the contradiction between
the welfare of the individual and the welfare of the community.
It did not work.

     It is not at all apparent what joining the Blithedale
community meant for each of the participants.  The awesome
snowstorm with which the story begins, satisfies Shaftesbury's
criteria of the sublime. It is symbolic the barrier, the no
man's land, that separates Blithedale from the rest of West
Roxbury. The determination with which Coverdale's braves the
fury of the storm appears as an initial but ultimately
unconvincing index of his passion.  The Fosters were
presumably the original hosts, familiar with the farm and its
agriculatural needs; they did not join: they were there when it
all began.  Zenobia's arrival antedated Coverdale's account and
remains undocumented and unexplained.  She and the Fosters were
aleady there, established, at Blithedale from the beginning.
Hollingsworth is invidiously described as having come in the
furtherance of a philanthopic mania which would have subverted
Blithedale.  Priscilla is imported by Hollingsworth.  So only
Coverdale remains to be accounted for, an unreliable narrator,
inconstant and untrustworthy, whose eavesdropping and voyeurism
is the expression not of his nature, but of his literary
creator's (Hawthornes) compositional awkwardness.  Perhaps
Coverdale was motivated to Blithedale, possibly like Hawthorne
himself to Brook Farm, by an inclination to conform to fashion
rather than by a consuming moral imperative.


     Except for Hollingsworth who had his own agenda, the
inhabitants of Blithedale seem to be at loose ends.  Coverdale
seems to have had no purpose at all, except implicitly as the
reporter.  I don't think it occurred to Hawthorne, and certainly
not to Coverdale, that Hollingsworth's project: the reformation
of criminals: was perhaps not entirely inapplicable to the
denizens of Blithedale, who like all other human beings were
guilty of something like original sin which Hawthorne's forbears
had been so expert in identifying, and that the Blithedale guilt
was of such nature that Hollingsworth indeed had his work cut out
for him; arguably Zenobia, aware of her guilt, implored to be
released, reformed, redeemed by him; and committed suicide when
forgiveness was denied her.

     Hawthorne paints portraits of Zenobia and Priscilla, rivals
in love, with much labor and affection.  To me it seems obvious
that although Coverdale purports to have loved Priscilla, the
portraits suggest that it was infact Zenobia whom he loved. 
The description of Priscilla in her passivity and weakness did
nothing to extol the competence of women.  The portrait of Zenobia,
unremittingly seductive, depicted her not as an executive of the
commune but as a mother and nurse, and the fitting object of the
Oedipus complexes of the men for whom she cared.

     Zenobia's suicide an expression of despair?  Zenobia's death
the consequence of unrequited love? Improbable.  Zenobia's death
an accident, like Margaret Fuller's?  Not even that.  Zenobia's
was sacrificed to make Hollingsworth look evil, to make him a
murderer.  Zenobia's suicide was a device ex machina, to put the
mark of Cain on Hollingsworth, it was a stage effect, required to
conclude the Blithedale Romance, which, after Coverdale-Hawthorne
had lost whatever little initial interest it had for him,
couldn't go on indefinitely.

     Zenobia, Priscilla, Coverdale had no agendas beyond their
passions.  "Schwerer Pflichten taegliche Bewahrung, Sonst bedarf
es keiner Offenbarung."  was a sentiment unfamiliar to them.
Should it in fact be true that there is no reality to life, or to
the human psyche, other than sexual love, other than eros.
Hollingsworth was impugned because he had something other than
"romance" in mind.  Not Coverdale with nothing to do, it was
Hollingsworth with his creative agenda who was the real artist,
who looked beyond Blithedale; and that is why he was disparaged.
Blithedale was a coeducational monastery.  Compare it to boarding
school, college, military service, kibbutzim, prisons, retirement
homes.

     Coverdale is ranked by the critics in the category of an
unreliable narrator.  Neither Zenobia nor Priscilla loved
Coverdale, but Hollingsworth who nursed him through his illness
did, Coverdale resented Hollingswoth's affection and invidiously
attributed it to ulterior motives for advancing his cause.  One
of the most striking scenes of the novel is Hollingsworth
pleading for Coverdales friendship and being rejected.  Hawthorne
seems oblivious that ultimately the only meaningful relationship
which men and women have to each other is in advancing, promoting
something outside themselves, struggling for a cause, procreating
and nurturing children; but there are no children at Blithedale.

     The Blithedale Romance as art which redeems and/or indicts.
We can construe Hawthorne as creating a work of art which is
an indictment of himself, malgre lui, unconsciously condemning
himself, so that he might be forgiven, redeemed.  We can construe
Hawthorne as creating a work of art which is a justification of
himself, thereby documenting his guilt.  Ultimately it doesn't
matter what Hawthorne's intention was; arguably it was only to 
achieve publication. Whatever he wrote would be unavoidably a
copy, a duplicate of what was on his mind, and what was on his
mind was a reflection, through a glass, darkly, of reality, and
thus an instrument of transcendental apperception.

     Arguably Hawthorne was the ultimate diplomat, (or
politician), or opportunist in that he married Sophia Peabody
in part to promote his writings. Sophia's sister Elizabeth
(Emerson's pupil in Greek) had introduced Hawthorne to Emerson.
His liaison with the Peabody family was his strongest link
to the transcendentalists, a connection helpful in promoting
his writings. Ten years later, disillusioned with Brook Farm
and perhaps with the transcendentalists, Hawthorne enlisted
in Franklin Pierce's presidential campaign, if not sympathetic,
then indifferent to Pierce's politics.  In his political
biography of Pierce, Hawthorne extols the Mexican war, extols
slavery, and extols compromise to avert disruption of the Union,
and the war that was sure to follow. Was Hawthorne a pacifist,
was he an opponent of war under all circumstances? Obviously
not so far as Mexico was concerned. But why should he fear war
with the South over slavery if he approved of war for territorial
aggrandizement?  Or was he in his political writing at least, a
man without conscience, or one whose conscience was molded to
prevailing cirumstances, and if so, can we trust him at all?

     Brook Farm had failed by the time Hawthorne wrote.
I don't think his purpose was to disparage Brook Farm.  I
think he wrote about it because a book about Brook Farm would
sell; because he considered it an appropriate location where his
fantasy might flourish.  I think that he disparaged philanthropy
as a proxy for abolitionism; he was offended by abolitionism and
exploited the circumstance that there would be numerous
individuals who welcomed relief from the social pressures of
philanthropic expectations and who would find their propensities
justified in his book.

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