Unconventional people went by different names in different eras. In more recent history, they were known as “beatniks” or “hippies.” In the mid-1800s, they were known as something else: transcendentalists.
What they were transcending was wide-ranging and amorphous, but their commitment to living in a world free of conventions was clear. For them, nature was a source of truth more powerful than any human creed. Who cared about money or class when there was eternal beauty?
Nathaniel Hawthorne was for a time one of these seekers, making his home for a few months in a utopian community called Brook Farm just outside Boston. While his time there wasn’t long, its impact went deep enough to form the basis of perhaps his most personal novel.
Being that Brook Farm was a communal experiment, it seems fittingly perverse the focus of The Blithedale Romance is so intimate, to the point it might be dubbed a meditation on subjectivity itself. He writes: “By long brooding over our recollections, we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly capable of being distinguished from it.”
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| Nothing remains today of Brook Farm as it existed in the 1840s, when Transcendentalists established the first secular communal living center in the United States. It closed in 1847, after six years in operation. Blithedale Romance recounts the drudgery of farm life, by which the community tried to make a living. Image from https://newbrookfarm.org/the-story-of-brook-farm/ |
But is that Hawthorne speaking to us, or narrator Miles Coverdale? It’s hard to know, given how often the subjective and objective flip in this crafty, tricky, frustrating book. The trap of social conventions was a common theme of Hawthorne’s more famous prior novels, The Scarlet Letter and The House Of The Seven Gables. The absence of those same conventions serves as a similar kind of trap here.
If Hawthorne was impressed by his Brook Farm companions, he gives no evidence of it. Coverdale tells us at the outset that the community of Blithedale was dedicated to “showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles,” but what he reveals of that life seems petty and aimless:
Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with, in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any farther. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity.
Friction centers around three Blithedale inhabitants. One is the pseudonymous female lead, Zenobia, a commanding feminist who imparts her high ideals upon the community. Clashing with her is an apparent beau, Hollingsworth, who has different philanthropic goals he pursues with a singularly intense Christian spirit that proves both admirable and off-putting.
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| At least one real-life Brook Farm location is referenced in Blithedale Romance, a raised rock from which missionary John Eliot legendarily preached to Christianized American Indians in the late 1600s. In the novel, Hollingsworth holds forth on the same rock, earning Zenobia's admiration while annoying a jealous Coverdale. Image by Felix Octavius Carr Darley from https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/16610 |
The third person, at least early on, is Coverdale himself, a published, minor poet and barely reformed layabout whose self-congratulatory narration offers a running lesson on the perils of subjectivity. Coverdale affects a kind of brotherly concern, but at sum puts one in mind of the Roman philosopher Lucretius’s famous saying: “Pleasant it is to look over a stormy sea and observe a sailor’s tribulations.”
As the story develops, a fourth character emerges, the frail and childish Priscilla. She may wilt before the more charismatic Zenobia, but seems to have Coverdale’s number, sensing in his false humility a kind of subterranean loathsomeness. This attitude of hers eventually contributes to Coverdale’s unwilling exile from the group. But as Coverdale pleads his case to the reader, you find yourself sympathizing with the guy. Everyone in the story is dodgy, to a degree.
Which is where The Blithedale Romance eventually shakes out. As a story, it’s fairly nebulous. The rest of the community’s inhabitants are scarcely seen at all, except as distant figures on a landscape and as mute masked revelers at an outdoor party near the end. Whatever specific tenets unify them is never spelled out. The story seems exclusively focused on four central people, with two other characters of substance in the form of visitors who lurk in the corners of the frame to effect plot twists.
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| Margaret Fuller, an early American feminist and writer, is the recognized inspiration for Zenobia in the novel. Hawthorne did what he could to push back on the identification, even having characters mention the real Fuller as another person. Fuller never formally joined Brook Farm, though she often visited. She died before the novel was published. Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Fuller |
Where the book succeeds, and well, is as a fictional autobiography on a self-deluded scoundrel, whose wit may be his saving grace:
The greatest obstacle to being heroic, is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt – and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
For me, The Blithedale Romance is Hawthorne’s most enjoyable novel – and his most topsy-turvy. The withering, snarky sensibility showcased here is one very much in tune with modern times. The way he shapes Coverdale’s smug account reminds me of what David Copperfield might have been like had it been narrated by Uriah Heep. It is a romance with nothing very romantic about it, a conceit I enjoy.
On the other hand, this is a very insular novel, its tiny cast something of a detriment as the story goes on. Hawthorne wasn’t one for subplots, and these are sorely missed here. The fine-grained depictions of troubled emotions at low boil for long intervals grow tedious after a while, even if one marvels at Hawthorne’s craft in depicting them. The finale is a lurch in the direction of tragedy that is more a shrug than a climax.
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| Brook Farm's proximity to Boston is mirrored by Blithedale's in the novel. The actual site was also close to another Transcendentalist marker, Thoreau's Walden Pond, as well as the Revolutionary War battlefields of Lexington and Concord. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebNDbvbg8BE |
At one point, Coverdale journeys to Boston, taking a room that overlooks a busy neighborhood. The spectacle of life lived on a grand scale, which in Hawthorne’s hands has a surprisingly satisfying, almost tactile quality, blew me away. It also made me realize how languid events had been to that point. Just as I was beginning to enjoy this interlude of Coverdale spying on strangers instead of friends, who shows up but Zenobia and Priscilla. Antics resume with the usual gang of four.
At least this moment in the novel brings us its signature moment, when Zenobia catches sight of Coverdale looking over at her from the other building, and instinctively reacts in her queenly way:
She signified her recognition of me by a gesture with her head and hand, comprising at once a salutation and dismissal. The next moment, she administered one of those pitiless rebukes which a woman always has at hand, ready for an offense, (and which she so seldom spares on due occasion,) by letting down a white linen curtain between the festoons of the damask ones.
The reason why that moment sticks out so, at least for me, is because I didn’t know how to react to it. Was I happy to see him snubbed? Or did I feel injured, since as a reader I was basically looking over Coverdale’s shoulder, and thus shut out, too?
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| One famous Transcendentalist who declined an invite to join Brook Farm was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He viewed it as an unserious place where the personal would win out over the communal. It is a take similar to Hawthorne's on Blithedale. Image from https://www.thoughtco.com/biography-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-4776020 |
Many readers agree with the theory that Coverdale is a kind of unconscious villain at worst, and at best an unreliable narrator. But Coverdale does care for the others, more than they do of him. His main failing at bottom is an inability to leave well enough alone.
It is in his egregious way of expressing this unwillingness, his nosy impropriety and sense of entitlement, where Hawthorne most openly pushes Coverdale’s unworthiness of our sympathies.
At one point, he looks on as his friend Hollingsworth juggles the affections of both Zenobia and Priscilla. One sees him more as a father figure, but never mind, Coverdale’s jealousy is exquisite:
Generosity is a very fine thing, at a proper time, and within due limits. But it is an insufferable bore, to see one man engrossing every thought of all the women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion, without even the alternative of solacing himself with what the more fortunate individual has rejected.
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| A first edition of The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852. After The Scarlet Letter and The House Of Seven Gables, Hawthorne would be disappointed by the public reception the third book got. Critics were more interested in his prefatory disclaimers about Brook Farm than the story which followed. It would be almost a decade before he published his next (and final) novel. Image from https://www.ebay.com/itm/The-Blithedale-Romance-1852-True-First-Edition-Nathaniel-Hawthorne-/323745860607?_ul=IN |
Coverdale is so sanctimonious he flatters himself with the idea of coming upon his companions’s ruination and, after pleasuring himself with their downfall, proceeding to lecture the rest of the world on what made them great and what made them fall short.
Coverdale is a connoisseur of wasted time, a thoroughly modern man in many respects. He would have loved the internet.
If his life is built on artifice (and from what he tells us of his life outside Blithedale, it is), he is hardly alone. His subjective approach to life has an assailable logic. When Hollingsworth calls him out for his humbug, Coverdale is unfazed: “I wish you would see fit to comprehend,” retorted I, “that the profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine-tenths of nonsense; else it is not worth the breath that utters it.”
The fact that Blithedale the community has so little a place in The Blithedale Romance may be Hawthorne’s way of acknowledging no group, however noble, can surmount individuality in any society. Surely it doesn’t here. Everything that happens in the book is of intimate concern to a handful of characters, and of no interest to anyone else.
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| At Blithedale, Coverdale finds much work but few friends. When he takes his leave, he says his farewells to the pigs kept there. "It would be more for the general comfort to let them eat us, and bitter and sour morsels we should be," he cries. Image from https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/newton-tab/2017/07/03/historic-newton-highlights-brook-farm/20385346007/ |
The Blithedale Romance is Hawthorne’s subtlest book, with some of his finest writing. There is an entire literary career contained in its covers, that of Henry James, who would take the atomization of impulse and intellect seen here even further, providing some of the finest descriptive writing in literature. Coverdale’s suspect narration in particular has echoes in many of James’s first-person stories.
But
as a story, it feels incomplete. Certainly its plot is more difficult to
encapsulate than of more famous Hawthorne novels that came before, less modern though
they are. If one is to argue Blithedale Romance is a great novel, and I
think it is, one has to allow a classic caveat, best expressed by one Ian
Faith, that its appeal is more selective. The novel endures partly as
historical curio and mostly as satire directed at progressives and the age-old,
futile impulse to improve upon mankind.
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