
                           20050622.00

               Notes on the Blithedale Romance (3)

     Reading Hawthorne is to unroll, as on a tapestry, the vast
intellectual and spiritual history of New England America from
the 17th Century to the Civil War.  The map which is drawn by
Hawthorne, or, more correctly, the map which can be extrapolated
from Hawthorne's writing is far from definitive or conclusive;
but for me, at least, Hawthorne's romances are reminders of the
existence of uncharted territories I have not yet explored, and a
promise of insights I might glean if only time and energy
allowed.

     One of the foci of the Blithedale Romance is the heroic
apparition and the pathetic demise of Zenobia.  There have been
other queens, Jocasta, the wife of Oedipus, Dido of Carthage and
Cleopatra of Egypt, to name (the) only three (that come to mind)
who have committed suicide, and dying was for them an act of
heroic desperation.  Schiller, for one, exalted suicide as the
ultimate act of women's liberation. (Wilhelm Tell, Act 1, Scene 2) 
Not so for Zenobia.  Her death remains spiritually, if not
forensically, a murder mystery, and I would suggest that her
death was a mistake: a clerical error on the part of the novel's
author.  If Zenobia was a victim at all, she was the victim of
Hawthorne's misguided attempt to revise or rewrite the moral law
and to reconstruct the ethical universe, by stigmatizing
Hollingsworth's love as a vice, by extolling Coverdale's
indifference as virtue, and thus to turn night into day and
vice versa.

     The other focus of the Blithedale Romance, of course is the
veiling and unveiling of Priscilla, which seems to me, perhaps in
consequence of hermeneutic irresponsibility on my part, as
awkward and botched a stage mystery as I have encountered in a
long time, a concatenation of incongruities which precludes any
serious interpretation.  The best thing I can say about the saga
of the veiled lady, is that it appears as a story within a story,
like Hamlet's play within a play, potentially a stroke of
literary genius, a parable of being and not-being to which, it
seems to me, Hawthorne fails to do justice.

     With Professor Westervelt, when I first encountered him in
the novel I shook hands as the emissary to Blithedale of the
German university, to whose inscrutable philosophy tout le monde
pays homage but which no one understands, and which is suspected
by the more astute to be inadvertent, if not, deliberate, humbug.
The subsequent revelation that Westervelt's craft was not
philosophy but mesmerism only corroborates the suspicion.

     So far as the heroine or victim of Westervelt's theater is
concerned, I consider it, as did Thomas Mann's Mario, the
ultimate humiliation, thus to be presented to the public as a toy
in the hands of the magician, to be subjected to the symbolic
destruction and resurrection of ones person, as is implicit in
the public veiling and unveiling of the helpless girl.  In this
context, Hollingsworth's dramatic and mock heroic public
interruption of this charade has a potential literary
significance which Hawthorne, once more, did not exploit, and
perhaps did not recognize.

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