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                      20050620.00

     I conclude that my initial response to reading the
Blithedale Romance should be an account of what I found
pleasing; as if I had just seen, or were still seeing a play
on a theater stage. While here, I have an obligation to
contemplate with equanimity, as if I had expected them,
imperfections of all kinds, and then politely to overlook
and to overhear what might have disappointed me.  One does
not burst out with criticism of the staging, as soon as the
play ends.  One does not complain that the lights were too
bright or too dim, that the actors' costumes were too shabby
or too elegant, that their whispers were inaudible or that
their shouts injured ones tympanic membranes.  One claps
ones hands in polite applause, and searches ones mind for
nice things to say about the production.

     In this spirit I would like to commend the richness of
Hawthorne's language, the broad vocabulary with more
unfamiliar words per chapter than any text I can remember
having recently read.  The sentences ornate, crafted,
artful, like the trim of a Victorian mansion.  The character
description impressive: Zenobia, beautiful in both
simplicity and elegance; Priscilla developing from
excessively modest humility to full feminine bloom, both
women admired by the ineffectual Coverdale and the monomanic
Hollingsworth, not to speak of down-to-earth Foster.  The
introductory snowstorm serves as majestic transition into a
different world.  The warmth of the farmhouse; the enchanted
woods whispering fairy tales.  Eliot's Pulpit, and the eyrie
from which Coverdale eavesdrops on Westervelt and Zenobia.
A geographic separateness corresponding to the spiritual,
emotional, perhaps even intellectual isolation of
Blithedale.

     But then, later, the charm wears off, and in time 
it becomes ones duty to reflect on what the story means, to
put it into historical perspective and into the context of
ones own life.  One marshals the known historical facts.
Blithedale was modeled on George Ripley's Brook Farm and
Brook Farm was an expression of transcendentalist vision and
Fourierist ideology. Hawthorne was a trustee and spent there
the summer of 1841, all the while writing "sardonic" letters
to his fiancee reflecting his dissatisfaction with the
place.  The following summer, July 1842, Hawthorne got
married and moved not to Brook Farm but to Concord for three
years and from there to Lenox.  In the Berkshires he wrote
his three important Romances in quick succession, the last
being Blithedale.  He also wrote and published a biography
of his friend Franklin Pierce, then a candidate for the U.S.
presidency; a political tract in which Hawthorne strongly
endorses Pierces pro-slavery politics, and is severely



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critical of abolitionists as being prepared to destroy the
Union in pursuit of their philanthropic goals. The
Blithedale Romance may be interpreted as Hawthorne's
rejoinder, rather anemic, it seems to me, to Uncle Tom's
Cabin, which was published the same year.

     I construe the Pierce biography as the key to the
Blithedale Romance because it explains the anomaly of
Coverdale's disparaging of Hollingsworth's philanthropy.
Arguably Hollingsworth, in his own way, in seeking the
rehabilitation of criminals, was implementing the Biblical
injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself, and the
attempt to bridge the gulf between society and its outcasts
strikes me as a most genuine act of Christian charity
Coverdale, insensitive to the meaning of these efforts,
seems consumed with the need to blacken Hollingsworth's
character, and in the context of this defamation, Zenobia
is sacrificed, to the end that Hollingsworth might be
represented as her murderer.  But Zenobia's death is
also the deserts of an uppity woman who will not stay
in her place as man's obedient servant.  Hollingsworth's
denigration serves to appease the reader's, and the
author's self-righteousness. He is displayed as the
do-gooder responsible both for Zenobia's death and for the
demise of Blithedale.  Translated into the campaign of
Franklin Pierce for the presidency, it is suggested to the
reader that the abolitionists should be held responsible
both for the prospective dissolution of the divinely
ordained Union, and also for the destruction of the
affectionate harmony then purportedly prevailing between
masters and slaves.  If the philanthropist Hollingsworth
is to be made responsible for Zenobia's drowning, one
might ask, why shouldn't Harriet Beecher Stowe be held
responsible for the storm that cost the life of Margaret
Fuller?

     The symbolism of literature is powerful.  It is
intolerant of, and tends to avenge its abuse.  If, as at
least some Christians hold, all men are sinful, then sin is
or should be a crime, and all men are criminals, and
Hollingsworth's efforts in reconciling criminals and society
are not only appropriate but are essential for the future of
Blithedale.  And perhaps it was not the philanthropist (read
abolitionist) Hollingsworth, perhaps it was Coverdale-
Hawthorne who was really responsible for the demise of
Blithedale-Brook Farm, considering how he sat in his tree-
house writing sardonic letters to Priscilla-Sophia, instead
of attending the trustees' meeting at which he might have
saved the commune.

     Coverdale has been classified by the academicians as an
example of the unreliable narrator.  Beyond its function as
literature, the written text becomes a confession, or at any
rate becomes evidence for or against its author.



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With respect to Coverdale's disparagement of philanthropy
"Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Coverdale's
ambivalence toward Hollingsworth is amply documented.  If
Hollingsworth had asked for Coverdale's affection only one
more time, Coverdale says he would have relented.  Within
the confines of the novel, Hollingsworth was the only friend
that Coverdale had.  In real life it was Franklin Pierce who
was Hawthorne's friend, and Hawthorne was said to be the
only friend of the aging Pierce.  It requires only a small
sense of the dramatic to imagine Pierce pleading with
Hawthorne for his endorsement, Hawthorne's resistance, until
the final pleading to which Hawthorne relented, and agreed
to become a propagandist for slavery, betraying the memory
of Brook Farm, betraying Sophie and Elizabeth Peabody, who
had steadied the ladder on which he ascended to fame,
betraying the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson and
George Ripley, to embrace what most of his fellow citizens
deemed to be the ultimate evil: slavery.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
