Source of book: I own this.
This is book number three in the online book club a pair of friends and I have started. Previously, we read That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis and The Shining by Stephen King.
I hadn’t read much Hawthorne in years, although I read through most of the short stories and The House of Seven Gables during and after High School in addition to reading The Scarlet Letter for school. I re-read that a little over a decade ago. I intended to read The Blithedale Romance for some time, but just never got to it.
The Blithedale Romance is billed as being based on Hawthorne’s time spent as part of the Brook Farm utopian community, and it apparently caused a bit of a stir because some of the characters seemed based on real people. Hawthorne himself denied this in his preface, but the denial is a bit less than convincing.
I was a bit surprised that the book itself has very little to do with utopianism. Very little indeed is said about the life of the community, and very few of those involved actually get names or faces. There is the farm couple, Silas Foster, the actual farmer, and his wife, who doesn’t get a first name, but all of the other named characters are the members of the love quadrilateral which makes up the heart of the story.
Indeed, despite the readers of his era attempting to determine whether the book was written as an opposition to socialism or even attempts at social reform generally, or in favor of them, Hawthorne personally and in this book refuses to take sides. The issues of social reform are examined, but ultimately the book is one of personalities and interpersonal conflict, not great social ideas.
Connected to this as well is the question of the narrator, Miles Coverdale. This is Hawthorne’s only book written in the first person, so it is tempting to identify Coverdale and his ideas with Hawthorne. This would be a grave mistake, as I realized by the end of the book.
Hawthorne does not portray Coverdale in a positive way. While he initially seems trustworthy, if a bit bland, and a man ostensibly interested in social justice; by the end, it becomes obvious that he is a thoroughly unreliable narrator, a person to full of himself to be able to understand the dynamics of other relationships and personalities, a person who is unwilling to sacrifice more than a cigar for his supposed ideals, and a man who is incapable of honesty even to himself.
In other words, I think Coverdale is the most loathsome of Hawthorne’s protagonists, and I actually find him less likable than even Roger Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne clearly understands this - he wrote the character this way, and gives him the unhappy life that is the natural consequence of his actions.
In light of this, reading Coverdale’s eventual rejection of social reform as Hawthorne’s own view seems disingenuous. Coverdale isn’t Hawthorne, but he is a nuanced character created by Hawthorne for this book. Hawthorne all too fully understands the inherent flaws in Coverdale.
To the degree that Hawthorne is making any sort of an argument about socialism and utopian communities, it is that all good intentions are undermined by human frailty. It is easy to claim a desire for social equality, but to actually interact on an equal basis proves difficult. It is easy to approve of feminism until you have to wash the dishes. It is nice to think of an egalitarian community, but less fun to go muck out the barn or hoe the crops.
This gap between aspiration and execution is a key theme in the book.
You see it in the main characters’ condescension toward the Fosters, who are the only reason they don’t starve. You see it in the of-its-time stereotypes of the Irish (as big-boned, washerwomen, and so on) blithely used by its characters. You see it in the way Coverdale and Hollingsworth are unable to see women as fully-realized humans. And most obviously, you see it in the way that grand plans and esoteric ideas never really result in concrete change, either in society, or in the characters themselves.
The four main characters are Coverdale, the young poet who halfheartedly joins Blithedale; Hollingsworth, the social reformer (who is likely a composite of Brook Farm founder George Ripley, reformer Orestes Brownson, and prison reformers Charles and Murray Spear, who never were part of Brook Farm); “Zenobia,” the sensual and feminist woman that Hollingsworth appears to be a couple with; and Priscilla, a rescued seamstress with a mysterious past.
When I say “love quadrilateral,” I mean that with all points connected. While Hollingsworth is ostensibly coupled with Zenobia, it becomes clear later [spoiler] that he is also connected to Priscilla. Coverdale claims at the end to have been in love with Priscilla, but spends a lot of the book fascinated personally and sexually with Zenobia.
And that is just the heterosexual tension. Coverdale starts his stay at Blithedale ill after a slog in a snowstorm (drawn from Hawthorne’s actual experience), and is nursed back to health by Hollingsworth. They start out incredibly close, until Hollingsworth tries to recruit Coverdale to his scheme of converting Blithedale into an institution for reformation of prisoners.
The language and symbolism Hawthorne uses goes beyond a simple friendship into man crush territory. Hollingsworth’s pleas sound like a marriage proposal, and Coverdale acts like he has had a bad breakup.
Oh, and also, Priscilla throws herself at Zenobia’s feet in a manner carefully drawn to be like a suitor’s proposal, and the language the two of them use about each other is beyond ordinary friendship.
Yes, I know that often same-sex friendships used language we now find homoerotic, but Hawthorne seems to be deliberately creating sexual tension here as well.
This all sets up a series of betrayals that bring the book to its tragic conclusion. It isn’t that socialism has failed, but rather that the ideals of the community in having relationships as “brothers and sisters” have been undermined and destroyed by the conflicting goals and actions of the characters.
Hollingsworth doesn’t care about either woman; what he cares about is money to build his reformatory. (The fact he fails at this too is part of the betrayal.)
Zenobia wants to be loved for who she is, not for her money, but neither man truly respects her. Hollingsworth turns out to be appallingly anti-feminist, while Coverdale simply doesn’t care about Zenobia beyond his fantasies of her naked body and imagined sexual experience.
Priscilla wants freedom from the spiritualist charlatan she has been nearly enslaved by, but Hollingsworth and Zenobia end up betraying her to him.
And Coverdale: what does he want? Perhaps to feel like a good, progressive person, but without actually having to act like one? Is he content to live in his own fantasy world, without actually learning to relate to other people? Does he really see Blithedale and its people as just fodder for that epic poem he intends to write someday? That last one is all too plausible.
The Blithedale Romance is a good example of what Hawthorne does best: examine the psychology of humanity gone wrong. As in The Scarlet Letter, nobody - nobody - has pure motives. Particularly the respectable or self-righteous characters. Hawthorne pokes at the sore spots in this book, particularly those of people who aspire to be social reformers. It really is the question of whether one is doing any good, or just making one’s self feel good about it.
I have to quote a few lines, starting with this one by Coverdale that hints about how useless he would be as a utopian.
“What a pity,” I remarked, “that the kitchen, and the house-work generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether! It is odd enough, that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life - the life of degenerated mortals - from the life of Paradise. Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day.”
Zenobia snarkingly points out that it is in the middle of a snow storm, so you need clothes and food, which can’t just be picked from the trees. In any case, Paradise has always been a human fantasy, only approached by those wealthy enough to experience it on the backs of the oppressed.
Later that night, Coverdale sees Mrs. Foster (the unnamed wife of Silas) “fall fast asleep” while continuing to knit. I mention this because I suspect it is possible that my wife could indeed knit in her sleep, although I haven’t yet seen it.
Priscilla also creates, in her case, these fine purses, which Coverdale muses might be “a symbol of Priscilla’s own mystery.”
I had to look up dates, because, I mean, Freud, right? Well, The Blithedale Romance was published in 1851, and The Interpretation of Dreams didn’t come out until 1899. Heck, Freud wasn’t born until 1856. So maybe rather than saying Hawthorne was intentionally using Freudian imagery, maybe it was Freud using Hawthornian imagery? It sure looks like Hawthorne was consciously using the “purse as symbol of the vagina” a half century before Freud spelled it out.
Gender fluidity also makes an appearance. In Hawthorne’s day, the respective spheres of women and men was more rigid, and, thanks to the Cult of Domesticity, certain virtues were assigned as “female” even more than they are now, which is difficult to comprehend, given our current moment of toxic masculinity and fear that any physical affection or caretaking is somehow “gay” if a guy does it.
Coverdale laments that men are socialized against caretaking, but notes that Hollingsworth seems to be an exception.
But there was something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is best in them, nor seemed ever to know that there was such a soft place in his heart.
This is a paradox, in light of Hollingsworth’s fairly vicious anti-feminism later in the book. But I have seen it myself, in plenty of otherwise tender and naturally nurturing men who have bought into the patriarchal ideology.
Not too long after this, Coverdale becomes disillusioned by Hollingsworth, after realizing that Hollingsworth is really all about his philanthropy, and doesn’t care about specific people that way. This observation was interesting to me, because I have seen a similar phenomenon, where a cause leads to a person mistaking their own obsessions for divine revelation.
He had taught his benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel; so that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments, unless they could minister, in some way, to the terrible egotism which he mistook for an angel of God.
I also took note of the extended conversation between Zenobia and Coverdale on whether men or women were the more happy. I decided it was too long to reproduce, but it was fascinating. Coverdale thinks women are happier, because if they get that one great thing - namely marriage - that’s all they need. Zenobia insists that men are happier, because they have so many more options - they can find happiness in any of a plethora of facets of their life. As I mentioned, don’t mistake Hawthorne for Coverdale. This conversation reveals far more nuance.
I also found this line interesting, as part of Coverdale’s opinion that utopia was a young person’s project.
Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this.
But Coverdale also pulls back, unwilling to entirely commit even to that. His ideals remain at best nebulous and ephemeral.
But, so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near, without finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward. We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every imaginable subject. 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.
After yet another truly blithery monologue from Coverdale, when he waxes eloquent about how all of them will be remembered in his epic poem centuries in the future, Hollingsworth finally calls him out on it.
“You seem,” said Hollingsworth,” to be trying how much nonsense you can pour out in a breath.”
That has to be the funniest moment in the book.
Near the end, after Hollingsworth’s betrayal of Zenobia, she and Coverdale are left alone. She too upbraids him for his ineffectiveness and lack of understanding.
“Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning this whole affair into a ballad.”
That is the tragedy of Coverdale. Even after everything, he himself admits that he has not change, that he has learned nothing.
Even though the book doesn’t really address the utopian community or utopianism generally, it is a good read, with plenty of psychodrama that remains relevant in our time.
If you want to read one of the best - and certainly the most humorous - accounts of a utopian experiment, I recommend The Experiences of the A. C. by Bayard Taylor. (And also his account of visiting California during the Gold Rush, El Dorado.)
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