
            Notes on the Blithedale Romance (10)

                         20050704.00

     Blithedale is autobiography; it is in fact the
autobiography of spirit, and as such it is an appropriate
commentary on romantic philosophy, (Hegel, Schelling) or
romantic philosophy is a commentary on it.  Blithedale
succeeds in describing the ambivalence of Hawthorne's spirit.
It gives a glimpse through the veil of biographical fact into
what "really went on" in Hawthorne's emotional life.  Life is
ambivalence: what are you going to be when you grow up, which
of the girls that you know are you going to ask to marry you,
and, for that matter, is your best friend going to be a man
or a woman? "If you marry, you will regret it; if you don't
marry, you will regret it. Whether you marry or don't marry,
you will regret it" (Kierkegaard) Inevitably, whatever you
decide, you wonder if you might not have made a mistake; and
soon you decide you have in fact made a mistake, you have
done wrong, you have sinned, and you want to confess. The
Blithedale Romance is Hawthorne's unconscious confession.

     It is unavoidable that one strives to resolve
ambivalence. Ambivalence is debilitating and to struggle to
escape from it, is a natural instinctual impulse.  If you
can't beat it you join it; if you can't make some one your
friend, he becomes your enemy.  When you don't like someone
or some thing, when it frightens or threatens you, you ask
God to get rid of it for you: you stigmatize it as evil.
Hawthorne/Coverdale was threatened by Westerveld, that's why
Westerveld was evil.  He was threatened by Hollingsworth's
intense determination, that's why Hollingsworth was evil. 
He was threatened by Zenobia's beauty and by her impressive
personality, that's why Zenobia was evil. And presently, the
whole world appears evil as for Goodman Brown.

     Blithedale/Brook Farm actually had a decisive role in
shaping Hawthornes life/career. He obviously loved Zenobia,
because you can't describe a woman like that unless at some
level of your psyche you want her and you want her very much.
Hawthorne/Coverdale also is ambivalent toward
Sophia/Priscilla; She didn't threaten him, she adored him;
that's why he wasn't afraid to marry her, yet at the same
time, to the extent that he was able to flirt, he flirted
with Margaret (Fuller)/Zenobia.  Margaret represented an
intellectual/emotional (read spiritual) world of a different
order. In this context, the awkwardness and mendacity of his
final statement "I loved Priscilla" is almost embarrassing.

     One should note in passing that Blithedale, presumably
like Brook Farm, was populated by nothing but WASPs.

     Hawthorne's loneliness; Why would he have joined
Blithedale, except to escape loneliness?  Still, his
notebooks and the descriptions of his associates reveal that
it was difficult to the point of impossibility for Hawthorne
to make friends.  He must have been awed and impressed by
Emerson.  He must have wanted Emerson or an Emerson surrogate
like Thoreau as his friend, or so one may infer by the
circumstance that he moved to Concord.  But that move was
successful no more than the move to Brook Farm.  Humiliated,
because he couln't pay the rent to George Ripley, who was
also his landlord at Brook Farm, he had to leave Concord with
little to show for his efforts: disparaging entries about him
in Emerson's journals, and midnight rendevous with Margaret
Fuller on the banks of the Concord River in which Margaret
most emphatically did not drown herself then and there.

     For all this disappointment and frustration, the
Blithedale Romance was a literary revenge on Margaret Fuller
(Zenobia) and Sophia Peabody (Priscilla).  The revenge
against transcendentalist idealism is less specific but all
the more emphatic in the demonization of Hollingsworth's
philanthrophy and Westerveld's philosophy. In sum, the whole
Blithedale world is evil, except for Coverdale, and he is
impotent.

     The Blithedale Romance is an expose, almost sensational
enough for the supermarket checkout counter.  In the Romance,
Zenobia's final discourse taunts Coverdale about
memorializing her in poetry.  I am reminded of Dido's lament
in Purcell's Opera: "When I am laid in earth, remember me,
but ah, forget my fate."  If a cartoonist had written
Blithedale, a balloon from Coverdale's mouth, speaking to
Zenobia and Hollingsworth, would have carried the caption:
"Boy am I ever going to write a book about you."  And he did.

     At what juncture in his life, Hawthorne switched parties
to ally himself with the pro-slavery faction is not revealed
by his biographers.  His mere presence and trusteeship of
Blithedale warrants that at least outwardly, he at one time
advocated freedom from all servitude.  But switching parties
is a common occurrence.  At some point, Hawthorne must have
said, perhaps only to himself: "If you don't give me the
honor I crave, the recognition which I need, I'll sign up
with Pierce, and use my literary talents to support the
slavery cause."  If Hawthorne could have had an affair with
Margaret Fuller, if Emerson and Thoreau had included him in
their friendship, if Harvard had bestowed a professorship on
him, I doubt that the campaign biography of Franklin Pierce
would ever have been written.

     As a human being Hawthorne was unappreciated except by
cripples, Sophia and Pierce.  The fact that Hawthorne was a
great artist, doesn't make him a paragon of anything. 
Artists are well known to betray their wives, if they even
bother to marry, to steal from their friends, to cheat their
agents.  Thomas Mann made a literary career stigmatizing
artists as criminals, and in that sense spent his life
intent on incriminating himself, and writing books which are
Bruchstuecke einer grossen Konfession.

     Hawthorne's Romance, as distinct from more mundane
novels, was the real literature of its time, and was
understood as such at least by his mother-in-law.  Hawthorne
reminds me of Matthew Brady, except that Hawthorne's scenes
are of the battlefield of the spirit.  Blithedale is virtual
photography, picture-making by Hawthorne of his world and of
himself. In the end, one should remember that Hawthorne was
only the portraitist, and as such not responsible for the
the world that the pictures reveal. As art they are the
confession which exonerated him and frees him from guilt.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
