 
           Notes on the Blithedale Romance (12)

                      20050707.00

     On first looking into Hawthornes Blithedale, then felt I
like some watcher, like Coverdale, behind a window, from
which a veil had been drawn, revealing an historical
landscape of which I had only been dimly aware, a view such
as I had never seen before, nineteenth century New England,
America, its transcendentalism, its socialism, its theology,
its rhetoric, its agony over slavery, and what the fugitive
slave act really meant, to those who insisted on, and enforced
it, to the slaves who were its victims, and to those citizens
whose souls where put to the test when they were forced to
chose between breaking the law and betraying their God.

     Zenobia's story of the Veiled Lady is very appropriately
the keystone of the novel; and I cannot discern whether
deliberately or inadvertently.  In the symbol of the veil,
the diverse threads of this Romance are entwined.  Within the
framework of the novel, the veiled lady, of course is
Priscilla, Westerveld's slave.  But Zenobia also was veiled,
and in her own way, a patent mystery, offenbar Geheimnis; and
with respect to the mystery of her appearance, Coverdale
advocates her sitting, not for a painter, but for a sculptor,
because the marble image is less veiled, reveals more flesh
and is more sensual than the painting.

     Amateur philology leads to Plutarch as one of the first
to relate the tradition of the Veiled Lady, when he tells the
story of the veiled statue of the goddess Isis in the
Egyptian city of Sais.  That veil was not to be lifted on
penalty of death or such.  Plutarch's account was related by
the German Schiller, an historian and philosopher as well as a
poet.  In his role as historian of ideas he finds Isis and
Jehovah to be related invisible veiled deities.  Schiller
wrote a very eloquent essay on this topic, and also a ballad:
The veiled Image at Sais.  The ballad was translated by
Longfellow who is most likely its source in the
transcendentalist tradition.  A curious allusion to the
veiled mystery of Sais occurs in Moby Dick.  The word Sais
is in fact the last word of chapter 78 of Moby Dick where
Melville, in humorous phonetic satire on the German philo-
sopher's corrupt pronunciation of whale as veil, equates
death by the stove of the whale with death from lifting
the veil.

     Conceptually, the veil serves well as the emblem of
transcendentalism, a term that was bandied about in the
1840's the way the term existentialism was bandied about
fifty years later.  Transcendentalism was much easier to
mouthe than to define, and in fact the veil is as persuasive
a definition of transcendental as we have.  The veil means:
you know that something is there, but you can't see it,
because the veil conceals.  Your knowledge, in other words,
transcends the veil.  You're not permitted to lift the veil,
but you're supposed to kiss the girl through the veil,
and that, as everyone knows, takes away the fun.

                          * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
