
         Notes on the Blithedale Romance (9)

                      20050703.00

     I have read again the last three chapters of the
Blithedale Romance. My memory has become furtive; the
details about Blithedale fade quickly from my mind.
My memory then addresses not the text, but my thoughts
about the text, and then, my thoughts about my thoughts
which feed on themselves recursively, as the computer
programmers would say, over and over again, until the
original text that set them in motion has all but
vanished from my mind.  The Blithedale Romance is the
kind of book, which if I had read it in my youth, when
my memory was tenacious, would have stayed with me all
my life.  I would have revisited its places,
re-experienced its drama, encountered its characters,
Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, Foster
over and over again; and over and over again I would
have discovered myself in those enchanted woods.  It
would have proved, if not a map, then at any event an
illustrated commentary on life.  But as it is, I have
not the time.  I have a commitment to my own novel,
which is the material with which I must occupy my mind
if I want to keep alive the hope of finishing it.

     The original Veiled Lady was the Egyptian Goddess
Isis, whose veiled statue in the temple at Sais is the
topic of Schiller's ballad: "Das Verschleierte Bild zu
Sais." The literary issue, then and now, in Egyptian
Sais, in Schiller's Jena, in Hawthorne's Blithedale:
what was it that the veil concealed? And what was
the fatal truth to be discovered by unveiling it. 
Schiller thought it was the secret of monotheism. 
The God whose name was not to be spoken was likewise
not to be gazed upon, was not to be represented as
visible or tangible reality.  For Kantians this
unmentionable and invisible God could readily have
metamorphosed into reality, into Wirklichkeit, into
das Ding an Sich.  Hawthorne's pitch is rather lower,
is much less sublime though perhaps not less
sophisticated. Hawthorne's veil conceals the features
of a woman, her beauty or her ugliness, which,
arguably, might indeed prove fateful, might prove
to be the ultimate truth or reality for the young man
who sought to unveil her.  Historically, the display
of dwarfs or giants or persons otherwise deformed
was a popular diversion. The veiled lady, mesmerism,
magical performances, were popular entertainment, so
was the magician as circus master who demonstrates
his subjects' skills or features to a boorish public,
who makes his victims: men, boys, women, girls,
slaves, or animals perform so that admission fees
might be collected.

     The veil is symbolic.  The original Egyptian
inscription to which Schiller referred is: "I am what
there is. I am all that is, that was and will be,
no mortal has lifted my veil.  He is only of himself,
and to this only one are all things indebted for
their existence."  Beethoven copied these sentences,
had them framed under glass, and placed them on his desk.

     From the very beginning, knowledge has been considered
to be dangerous and forbidden, the Genesis account of the
Garden of Eden, the apple from the tree of knowledge: 
for Adam and Eve the lifting of the veil was eating from
the tree of knowledge, and the immediate wisdom they gained
from that was to see that they were naked.  So clothing is
the veil, and the truth is that which is under the veil; 
and the man discovers the truth by taking off the woman's
clothes. The Victorians didn't allow themselves to say that,
or even to think that, hence they tittered and fantasized
about the Veiled Lady.

     The veil may also be understood as symbol of the barrier
to transcendental knowledge.  The veil become the device
of the professor, philosopher, magician, as the priest who
alone has the right to remove it.  In this context,
Melville alludes not to the Veiled Lady, but in a more
sombre mode, to Sais, (Moby Dick, Chaper 78) and tells
you that you don't possess the truth until you own the
sperm whale.  The truth of the sperm whale is his strength,
which will stove your ship.  To know that truth, to lift
that veil, puts you at the bottom of the sea.

     Hollingsworth's request of Coverdale's help in his
enterprise is an example of sociation, an attempt to establish
the fundamental relationship between individuals, in this case,
of the same sex.  Be my friend, be my brother, he askes
of Coverdale, let us do something together.  Coverdale refers
to brothwerhood and sisterhood.  The Zenobia-Priscilla axis is
the correlative of the Hollingsworth-Coverdale relationship.
But women are weaker: when they purport to assume the qualities
of men, they are destroyed.  Zenobia is punished like Prometheus
or Icarus, for being superior. So also Margaret Fuller. 
That relationships between men and between women, respectively,
if they are at all passionate, should be stigmatized as
homosexual, reflects less on the relationship than on the
character of the social environment in which the issue is so 
defined.

     Hawthorne, like Hollingsworth, had a choice of
(Peabody) sisters to marry. Elizabeth introduced him to
Emerson, but did not commit suicide over him.  I ask whether
Hollingsworth's selection of Priscilla over Zenobia was
really a sufficient cause for Zenobias suicide?  Arguably
not. Zenobia's suicide suggests that all that glitters is
not gold, that the soul was despondent, morbid, long before,
and that Hollingsworth's rejection was but a precipitating
event which triggered what had long been prepared.  This
suggests also that Zenobias regal bearing was of limited depth.
It is perhaps one of the weaker aspects of the novel that
Zenobia's despair is in no way anticipated, that my original
surmise was correct: that Zenobias tragedy was designed to
make Hollingsworth guilty of murder, and to pass judgment
on him.

     Silas Foster appears as "untertaker" as reCreator of the
physical appearance of the dead Zenobia. Zenobia's burial in
?holy unholy ground?

     With the issue of philanthropy and Coverdale's
repudiation of it, and with the story of the Veiled Lady,
Hawthorne recapitulates albeit in his own version and in his
own vernacular, the chief questions of Enlightenment
philosophy: What must I do? What can I know? Both issues
are presented crippled, deformed, intellectually degenerate
as they might have been discussed in Andrew Jackson's
inner circle. The coining of epithets, name-calling, is
not the answer to ethical conundrums;and women, beautiful
or otherwise, enticing prospective lovers at their peril
to unveil them are poor parodies or caricatures of ethical
and epistemological issues, cartoons which may have their
merits, but cannot do justice to the real problem.  It may
be Hawthorne's genius that he should be able to broach
these fundamental issues without understanding them. But
what does understanding them mean? Is my kind of explicit
verbal description a more compelling proof of understanding
than a poetic presentation? Or was Hawthorne's novel in
fact the documentation of his understanding?


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