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            Notes on the Blithedale Romance (13)

     A mystery that is solved, or a mystery that is soluble
isn't a mystery. It's a joke or it's a trick.  The Veiled Lady
is a riddle, it's not soluble; and you can't solve it by
calling it the mystery of life, the mystery of knowledge, the
mystery of sexuality, the mystery of God. Nothing solves a
real mystery, and the attempt to do so, adds another layer
of mystery.  The mystery of the Veiled Lady is the mystery
of Hawthorne himself.

     The mystery of the Veiled Lady is structurally the
center and the framework of this novel. Coverdale as narrator
is incompetent to explain it. He is, as he says, like the
chorus, the quintessential observer. Coverdale accuses
Hollingsworth: but the accuser always accuses only himself.
Because in the transcendental sense, one can make an
accusation only of a crime that oneh has committed oneself,
because one knows a crime only when one has committed it;
And unless you know the crime you cannot accuse anyone else
of it. And then, unavoidably, the accusation is always only
against yourself.

     So Coverdale spends his time at Blithedale stigmatizing
Hollingsworth as a Philanthropist. Simply name-calling. It is
not Hollingsworth but Coverdale-Hawthorne who arranges the
death of Zenobia.  Hawthorne needs Zenobia dead because he
needs to pin the murder on Hollingsworth: he needs to have
Hollingsworth appear as the murderer to divert suspicion from
himself. The plot of this story is the execution of one purpose:
to make Hollingsworth guilty, to make philanthropy, to make the
love of mankind a dirty word.

     For the rest, the veil is the emblem of transcendentalism.
The veil demonstrates the inaccessibility, the elusiveness, the
mystery of that which is masked. When the veil is removed, the
mystery is destroyed, and with the mystery, life.  that was
Ibsen's message in the Wild Duck.

                          * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
