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               Notes on the Blithedale Romance (6)

     When Hawthorne refers to: "Visionary transcendentalists
seeking for the better life," he interprets Blithedale as a
recapitulation of the American moira. It then appears as a
species of "inner emigration". The import of his account is
that "philanthropy", whatever it may be, is not integral to
the nation's destiny.  He may be right.

     Existentially, there is little difference between
stigmatizing a person as a philanthropist and calling him a
liberal, a communist, a reactionary, a WASP, a racist, a
conservative, a socialist, a Jew, a Catholic, a Muslim, a white
supremacist, a feminist, a male chauvinist, a Nazi, a rebel, a
terrorist, a fascist, a Democrat, a Republican, a puritan, a
Quaker, an environmentalist, or a pacifist. In each case, the
epithet serves either as an acronym to designate a threatening,
hostile relationship, or less commonly, a congenial one, an
ideological or emotional identification.

     What seems remarkable to me about the Blithedale Romance is
what I construe as the deliberate concoction of an epithet.  It
had never occurred to me that philanthropy was a four-letter
word.  Yet when in search of the definition of "panopticon" I
discovered Jeremy Bentham's pre-occupation with prison
construction, and John Stuart Mill's adoption of similar
projects, and the devolution of their vision of utopia into an
Orwellian world, a society that seeks total control over its
members, I ask myself whether I would not rather be left to die
alone than to become the beneficiary of philanthropy, and
Hawthorne's denigration of the love of mankind seems less
invidious, and, though perhaps inapparent to Hawthorne himself,
not entirely inconsistent with Emerson's repudiation of Lockean
psychology.

     Although I find Hawthorne's simplistic representation
unsatisfying, the answer is not to fight epithet with epithet.
It would be easy enough to stigmatize Hawthorne as a WASP pro-
slavery male-chauvinist reactionary, but that cascade of
insults solves no problems. I am concerned with Hawthorne's
fiction rather than with Hawthorne's person, and the issue for
me is not whether Hollingsworth's being or not being a
philanthropist is a good or a bad thing, but what philanthropy
and being a philantropist meant in Hawthorne's world and what
it means in our own. I am appalled both by the necessity and
by the futility of the nominalism that equates human beings,
human thoughts and human action with labels.
     
     That having been said, I cannot avoid the conclusion
that, like Coverdale, Hawthorne was unable to cope with the
moral existential issues with which his time, no different
from ours, was rampant, unable to resolve, perhaps not even
to recognize the conflict of personal and civic responsibility
which impelled John Brown to the assault on Harper's Ferry,
and which persuaded Thoreau, for one, to support Brown, an
expression of conscience in the face of which Emerson remained
silent. Even more troublesome to me is the circumstance that
Hawthorne was not even able to sublimate that conflict in his
writing, not to speak of being able to resolve it in his
relationships to Franklin Pierce on the one hand and to to his
wife's family, the Peabodys, Emerson, Thoreau, and the other
anti-slavery Transcendentalists on the other. It is appalling
to me that he did not recognize in the black fugitives, human
beings like those whom his forebears, of whom he was now
ashamed, had persecuted and killed.

    "Southerners were outraged that escaping slaves received
    assistance from so many sources and that they lived and
    worked in the North and Canada. As a part of the Compromise
    of 1850, a new Fugitive Slave Act was passed that made it
    both possible and profitable to hire slave catchers to find
    and arrest runaways. This was a disaster for the free black
    communities of the North, especially since the slave
    catchers often kidnapped legally-free blacks as well as
    fugitives.  But these seizures and kidnappings brought the
    brutality of slavery into the North and persuaded many more
    people to assist fugitives." (Aboard the Underground Railroad)

That Hawthorne was not only indifferent to, but supportive of
the brutality of slavery, is a fact that cannot be denied or
ignored in the interpretation of his moralizing fiction. The
circumstance that even socially sensitive critics like F. O.
Matthiessen have nonetheless passed over Hawthorne's political
activity in silence, might become the subject of a separate
inquiry.


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