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	            Notes on the Blithedale Romance (7)

	     I read in the Blithedale Romance as if it were a
	stereoscope or some other optical device through which I see
	not only the Blithedale of Hawthorne's fiction, peopled by
	Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla et al.  but a
	wide panorama of 19th Century New England and America, in
	some detail and in great depth.

	     I consider the Blithedale Romance in four or five
	categories.

	     First there is the story itself, and the questions it
	raises within its own framework.  What does the parable of
	the Veiled Lady mean?  Who were Moody, Coverdale,
	Westervelt, Zenobia, Priscilla, Hollingsworth?  I consider
	what Hawthorne tells us and what he does not tell us about
	them.  What would be the effect of being told more about
	Blithedale, its soil, its animals, its buildings, its
	population, its finances, its governance?  How does the
	novelist balance fantasy against (invented) facts.  Far from
	requiring more (invented) facts, or contending that more
	should have been provided, I nonetheless consider how the
	provision of more fictional data (or less) would have
	affected the story as a literary construction project,
	mindful that obscurity and lack of definition have esthetic
	and cognitive meaning of their own.	

	     The second question concerns the historical "facts" to
	which the Romance implicitly alludes, most important of
	course, the biography of Hawthorne himself, in addition, the
	Transcendentalist movement, Brook Farm, Fourierism, slavery,
	philanthropy, prison reform, mesmerism, Margaret Fuller, the
	underground railway, the abolitionist movement, Franklin
	Pierce, and the politics of the day. This history is very
	compelling and very instructive to me, and puts contemporary
	concerns into a valuable perspective.

	     Third are the moral, esthetic and intellectual dilemmas
	which Hawthorne's accounts unavoidably introduce, to which
	the philosophy du jour, Emerson's rhetoric, is incapable of
	giving expression. I cannot fault Emerson for not finding a
	solution, convinced as I am that no such solution exists.
	With respect to right and wrong, in regard to beauty and
	its absence, Thoreau is the only teacher whom one can trust. 
	Hawthorne himself is both intellectually and morally
	incompetent to cope with the ethical issues that faced him;
	and the virtue of his esthetics hinges on the question,
	whether his method of toxic spiritual waste disposal is
	environmentally safe and sound. The ethical questions do
	not entail condemnations of what Hawthorne and his
	contemporaries did or did not do, but realistic evaluations
	concerning what they might have considered doing differently. 


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	The ethical issues confronting a society that was faced with
	the choice of harboring, or betraying to the slave catchers,
	terrified human beings in agony and desperation, are not
	readily dismissed: What should I have done? What would Kant
	have said ... and done? What would his vaunted "categorical 
	imperative" have directed me to do? What about Locke, Hume,
	Bentham, Mill? We all know what Jesus said, but what would
	Jesus have done?

	     Fourth, there is the very important and interesting
	documentary record of the manner in which Hawthorne's
	writing was interpreted by contemporary and latter-day
	critics.  What did Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville,
	Henry and William James, the Holmeses, F. O. Matthiessen, to
	name only a few, have to say about the ethical and esthetic
	issues raised by Hawthorne's writing, malgre sui, inspite of
	himself? I interpret the silence of a critic like Matthiessen,
	a man of such exquisite conscience, to reflect the circum-
	stance that Hawthorne is literally indispensable among the
	sparse representatives of American literature; banish him for
	his ideology, and you will find no one to fill the void.

	     Finally I reflect on the strictly literary aspects: the
	relationship between Hawthorne's Romance and reality, what
	his writing meant to the contemporary reader then, and what
	his writing means to the contemporary reader now, (myself),
	and what it meant to the author himself.  To what extent, if
	any, was he writing to confound or to discharge a moral
	obligation, whether he recognized it as such or not?  Wasn't
	Hawthorne's compulsion to write, a species of "philanthropy"
	at least analogous to Hollingsworth's mania?  Was the
	composition of the Blithedale Romance for Hawthorne the
	discharge of an historical obligation to a literary or
	spiritual authority, somewhat analogous to the obligation
	to American politics and Franklin Pierce which he discharged
	with that hack political biography written in so different a
	style from his fiction? Must not his disparagement of phil-
	anthropy be interpreted as the assertion of a moral paradox
	that no thoughtful person can take at face value; a paradox
	that must be understood as deliberate self-incrimination,
	and as such, as a confession, in fact, a metaconfession, an
	accounting by Hawthorne of his own shortcomings as a human
	being who is incapable of coming to terms with philanthropy
	and slavery?  Should not this ultimate candor be construed
	as a plea for forgiveness? Literature, no matter how fanciful
	and imaginative, can't alter reality, and to the extent that
	we know how to read, reality is where it leads us.

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