
              Notes on the Blithedale Romance (5)

                           20050629.00

     Reading the Blithedale Romance is like looking into some
sort of literary optical device in which or through which I can
see the social, political and intellectual landscape of the first
half of the 19th Century in New England and in America as I had
never seen it before.

     I see not only Hawthorne as an author or Blithedale as a
retirement community; not only the Emersons and Thoreaus and
George Ripley, the Peabodys and the other transcendentalists, 
I see Emerson's dilemma as an American philosopher and the
incongruity of transcendentalism as an American intellectual
religion; and I see the drama of American politics and culture
in the agony and hypocrisy, the soul-searching and self-
righteousness of the controversies over the fugitive slave act,
over the extension of slavery into the territories, and most
saliently, over the abolition of slavery altogether. To me the
barbarity of slavery, defended by Hawthorne as a benign institution,
makes Guantanamo look like a recreational camp (which the American
government claims that it is); but I must not deceive myself by
denying that Christianity had been comfortable for 1850 years
promoting slavery, imprisonment and torture, while glorifying the
crucifixion of Jesus and preaching brotherly love. Blithedale
and Coverdale, Brook Farm and Hawthorne, were right there in the
middle of the moral quagmire of the nineteenth century.  Brook
Farm was founded as the ultimate societal repudiation of servitude
of any kind, and Hawthorne was the ultimate undercover infiltrator,
at one and the same time a Trustee of Brook Farm and a propagandist
for Franklin Pierce promoting slavery.

     Come to think of it again, the Blithedale Romance is a
tragedy.  And all of its protagonists are doomed.  Silas Foster
to unemployment, Zenobia to death in the Charles, Hollingsworth
to life-long penance for murder, Priscilla to be his wife,
Coverdale to insignificance. . .  and Hawthorne to become the
patron saint of Simon Legree.  The real observer-narrator is
Moody, who in his own experience has anticipated the tragedies
that will befall Zenobia, Hollingsworth and Priscilla.  From this
perspective, Blithedale appears not (only) as the failure of a
social experiment but also as the decline and death of a family
(Moody's).

     I don't think that any or all of this was in Hawthorne's
mind when he wrote. I don't think he really understood it.  I
think he was the passive instrument of inspiration, and in this
he differs from Jane Brox and Donald Hall whose universe was
essentially an egocentric one.  Hawthorne's is not.

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