

                           20050628.00

              Notes on the Blithedale Romance (4)

     I had expected that this might be a novel which one could
interpret within its framework, without reference to the
historical events, and without reference to to politics of its
author.  One doesn't need to invoke Shakespeare's biography to
explain Macbeth or the Tempest, or Homer's to explain the
Odyssey, or Goethe's to explain Faust.  However, the Blithedale
Romance is self-contained only to a limited extent.

     Moody, Silas Foster, the snowstorm, the isolation of the
woods, Priscilla and perhaps Zenobia will stand by themselves;
but to understand what is going on with Hollingsworth and
Coverdale, it seem to me, requires a perspective from outside the
text.  So in the end, I came to just the opposite conclusion: it
seems most meaningful to consider the Blithedale Romance as a
cultural document of its time, and a psychological document of
its author.

     Blithedale is a commentary on the socialist movements so
prominent in the history of the first half of the 19th century,
and on the search for existential meaning which marks the
American transcendentalist movement.  Blithdale reflects
Hawthorne's awkward and troubled relationships to these facets of
his time.

     Hawthorne was clearly interested in transcendentalism and
the socialist experiments. He was a trustee of Brook Farm; he
married into a transcendentalist family, the Peabodys.  And yet
he didn't sympathize totally, in fact he didn't sympathize at all. 
Like Coverdale, the unreliable narrator, he didn't really understand
what was going on. The world in which he lived was mystery to him:
Moody, Zenobia, Hollingsworth, Westervelt, he couldn't explain
any of them; and he didn't trust his intuition, that's why he
appears as an eavesdropper and a peeping tom.  Hawthorne didn't
understand transcendentalism, or Emerson or the theology and
philosophy that Emerson touted.  Hawthorne really wasn't in
sympathy with the New England culture of his day.  But he wanted
and needed to be part of it, and so he signed up with Brook Farm.
He spent a few months there in 1841, married in 1842, a
transcendentalist bride. The location where the marriage ceremony
was performed has its own symbolic significance: it was a
transcendentalist ceremony performed in the back room of
Elizabeth Peabody's bookstore, following which the newly marrieds
went to live not in Blithedale, but in the Concord of Emerson and
Thoreau.

     Brook Farm was, in its conception, an anti-servitude
statement.  No man was to be a servant, and no man was to be a
master. Significantly, Westerveld who displayed Priscilla, veiled,
on stage was symbolically if not factually her master. The veiling,
to be sure, accomplished the concealment of the body.  But to be
displayed veiled, is only the antithesis to being displayed naked,
and the antithesis serves to emphasize the thesis, which is the
nakedness of the female, or the synthesis, which is the
powerlessness and humiliation of being displayed at all.  For
Priscilla, Blithedale was a refuge where she escaped from
Westerveld and into which she was imported like a fugitive slave. 
It was for her a station on the underground railroad. But the
feminist - or the anti-feminist might argue that she could not
escape slavery, that her nature could not endure freedom, that
she married Hollingsworth.

     I read a profound anti-feminist bias into this novel.
Priscilla's ascent from humiliation is temporary; she reverts to
her lowly state in her affection for and marriage to Hollingsworth. 
The final image of Zenobia deprived of all her power and beauty is
as a deformed and mutilated corpse.  The contrast between the
reserved formality of the men and the emotional exposure and
vulnerability of the women in this novel brought to mind Manet's
painting of Le dejeuner sur l'herbe. (1863)

     The demonstrations of humanity, of human frailty, were hardly
conscious, not to speak of being deliberate on the part of Hawthorne.
It is plausibe to argue that, literally and figuratively, Hawthorne
did not know what he was doing, and that Blithedale is so enchanting
a place because it was in fact an enchanted expression of the
unconscious. If Hawthorne had clarified his thought and rationalized
his experience and his feelings, he would have written a different
book, which one probably wouldn't want to take time to read.  One
index of value in literature is the extent to which an author is
able to express what is unconscious for him, and to share with his
readers: life as an experience which none of us understands. I can't
think of a more appropriate definition of transcendentalism.

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