“The Blithedale Romance” conveys Nathaniel Hawthorne’s disillusionment with Brook Farm, Transcendentalism, reform movements, and the quest for individual and social perfection.
I.
Published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance offers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most trenchant criticism of America.[i] Unlike his more optimistic contemporaries who imagined the advance toward individual and social perfection in the United States, Hawthorne emphasized the deepening conflict between the individual and society. In much of Hawthorne’s later work, deception, fear and evil predominate as his vision of America past, present, and future grew darker. Rather than extolling the inevitability of progress in America, The Blithedale Romance anticipates the onset of tragedy.
Hawthorne based the novel on his experiences at Brook Farm, a utopian community that George Ripley established in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1841.[ii] Ripley had founded Brook Farm to apply the ideas of Transcendentalism to everyday life. He intended to substitute individual cooperation, social accord, and spiritual fulfillment for selfish competition, class conflict, and private alienation, which he thought increasingly characterized nineteenth-century American society. His objective was nothing less than to create heaven on earth. Elizabeth Peabody, who lived for a time at Brook Farm and who became Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, wrote in The Dial that Brook Farm marked an attempt to realize “Christ’s idea of society.” She explained that the residents sought, by a “reorganization of society itself, on those very principles of Love to God and Love to Man, which Jesus Christ realized in his own daily life” to bring about the Kingdom of God in the Massachusetts countryside.[iii]
The men and women who came to Brook Farm united to fashion what Ripley identified as a new social order, the purpose of which was to enable all members of the community to attain their full human potential. Residents shared equally in the work required to keep the community functioning so that they could also share equally in the opportunities for leisure that life at Brook Farm provided. According to Ripley’s view, leisure was essential not only to culture but also to the cultivation of self. He was thus among the first Americans to appreciate the benefits of leisure when most contemporaries associated it with idleness, sloth, and degeneracy.
Manual labor served another purpose as well. It helped residents to bridge the divide between the world of the intellect and the world of the flesh, a dichotomy that was among the central themes of The Blithedale Romance. Work set persons free and leisure made them whole, or so it seemed. As Hawthorne learned during his brief sojourn at Brook Farm, daily chores left him precious little time for leisure, and did nothing to make him feel gratified, independent, or complete. He came to detest the daily round of tedious jobs that rendered him too weary to write or even to think. He especially despised transporting manure from the dung heap, which he derisively referred to as the “gold mine,” to the fields. Far from liberating the soul, such labors stunted and finally destroyed it. In a letter to his betrothed, Sophia Peabody, dated June 1, 1841, Hawthorne famously expressed his revulsion:
… in the midst of toil, or after a hard day’s work in the gold mine, my soul obstinately refuses to be poured out on paper. That abominable gold mine! Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its treasures, in the course of two or three days. Of all hateful places, that is the worst; and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinion dearest, that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow of the field just as well as under a pile of money.[iv]
A few months later, on August 13, Hawthorne again wrote to Sophia to clarify the deadening effects of work on mind and soul. His attitude hardly corresponded with Ripley’s idealized vision. “Joyful thought,” he began, “in little more than a fortnight, thy husband will be free from his bondage–free to think of his Dove–free to enjoy Nature–free to think and feel! I do think that a greater weight will then be removed from me, than when Christian’s burthen fell off at the foot of the cross. Even my Custom House experience was not such a thralldom and weariness; my mind and heart were freer.”
For Hawthorne, labor was “the curse of this world,” which “proportionably brutified” the spirit. “Dost thou think it a praiseworthy matter, that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? Dearest, it is not so…. Not utterly buried under a dungheap,” he found consolation in the hope that his soul, although tarnished and defiled, could yet be restored to its former purity. [v]
For Hawthorne, the tension between the demands of the community and the freedom of the individual bred disenchantment. Eventually, he began to distance himself from life at Brook Farm. In a journal entry dated July 27, 1844, long after he had left Brook Farm but still occasionally visited, he completed his intellectual and spiritual departure. Brook Farm, he concluded, was no place to satisfy human aspirations. It had, instead, become an ant farm. “Here is a whole colony of little ant-hills,” he observed with a mixture of sorrow and derision, “a real village of them:”
Here is a type of domestic industry–perhaps, too, something of municipal institutions–perhaps likewise (who knows) the very model of a community, which Fourierites and others are stumbling in pursuit of. Possibly, the student of such philosophy should go to the ant, and find that nature has given him his lesson there. The spirit had long gone out of a place that was designed “to find all sorts of ridiculous employments for people that have nothing better to do….” All that remained of the enterprise were “the shattered ruins of a dreamer’s Utopia.”[vi] When a fire razed the main building of the compound in 1847, Brook Farm dissolved.
The Blithedale Romance conveys Hawthorne’s disillusionment with Brook Farm, Transcendentalism, reform movements, and the quest for individual and social perfection. But the book is more than a bitterly satirical commentary on life at Brook Farm and the utopian aspirations of the inhabitants. Blithedale also illustrates the consequences of egoism, of the Transcendentalist faith in the benevolence of the unfettered individual, and of the contempt for the limits that define human existence. In the beginning of the novel, the residents debate the name they should give to their utopian venture. Some favor calling it “The Oasis,” while others insist “on a proviso reconsidering the matter at a twelve-month’s end, when a final decision might be had, whether to name it The Oasis’ orSahara.”’ Far from being “the one green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world,” it is clear by the end that Blithedale has revealed its emptiness. It emerges not as a paradise but as a wasteland.[vii]
II.
The Blithedale experiment constitutes yet another instance of Americans’ efforts to shatter the boundaries of time and quest after the eternal. The protagonist and narrator, Miles Coverdale, and his companions ride “far beyond the strike of the city clock.”(TBR, 16) They blur the distinctions between the seasons, that is, they try to manipulate and control nature and to alter or even halt the passage of time. They strive to overcome the desolation of winter with the warmth of their reformist zeal. “We can never call ourselves regenerated men,” says one of Coverdale’s associates, “till a February northeaster shall be as grateful to us as the softest breeze of June.” (TBR, 17) Yet, almost from the beginning, Coverdale entertains doubts about these aspirations.
By the time he decides to leave the community, Coverdale has attained an insight that, although old and commonplace–the only sort of insight of which he is capable–seems the epitome of wisdom after the vapid life at Blithedale. He has discovered, as is written in the Book of Ecclesiastes, that “all things have their season” and “man cannot add any thing, nor take away from those things which God hath made.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-14) He acknowledges that “times change and people change, and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.”(TBR, 170) Impossible to evade, time is a hard fact of life. The self is more intractable and the world more unpredictable than Coverdale and the others allow. “Like fish which are taken in an evil net, and like birds which are caught in a snare, so the sons of men are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls on them…. Time and chance happen to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12)
Coverdale may have some inkling of the painful lessons that await him as he prepares to leave for Blithedale. Musing in his rooms on the evening before his departure, he is “not so very confident as at some former periods that this final step, which would mix me up irrevocably with the Blithedale affair, was the wisest that could possibly be taken.” (TBR, 13) From the outset, he has misgivings about his attempt to find a better life by leaving society and trying to outdistance the human condition. His sense that the nature and purpose of Blithedale is at once generous and absurd betrays a fundamental ambivalence toward the project, to say nothing of the hope for human betterment and social progress.
His reservations notwithstanding, Coverdale initially dedicated himself to the success of the project. To his surprise, he feels liberated as he draws closer to Blithedale. The city now looks dingy and forlorn to him. The footprints in the snow suggest the visible “track of an old conventionalism” from which he is determined to escape. On the way to Blithedale, he realizes that there is in the countryside “better air to breathe…. Air that had not been breathed once and again! Air that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and error, like all the air in the dusky city!” (TBR, 16-17) Dishonesty, artifice, and corruption pervade modern society. For a moment, Coverdale permits himself to believe that truth, sincerity, honesty, innocence, and wisdom reside at Blithedale alone.
But upon his arrival, he immediately qualifies his enthusiasm. Reaching Blithedale in the midst of an unseasonable spring snow storm, Coverdale sarcastically admits that nature acts as it will, indifferent to human desires. “`How pleasant it is!,’ remarked I, while the snowflakes flew in my mouth the moment it was opened. ‘How very mild and balmy is this country air!’” One of his companions admonishes him not to “laugh at what little enthusiasm you have left!… I maintain that this nitrous atmosphere is exhilarating.’” (TBR, 17) Coverdale’s doubts are apparent, but for the time being his ambivalence has literally and figuratively weathered a storm.
At the same time, Coverdale’s uncertainty renders him an unreliable narrator. His skepticism, which at times approximates cynicism, deprives him of the faith in human nature and the promise of moral regeneration that are essential to the success of the Blithedale community. In addition, his reluctance to sacrifice material comfort in exchange for a deeper and more fulfilling spiritual life further limits the scope of his moral vision and binds him irrevocably to the society he has tried to leave behind. Not only does he grumble about his exposure to inclement weather, not only does he complain about having to give up his “cosey [sic] pair of bachelor rooms” to live at Blithedale in far less commodious accommodations, but the pure country air also makes him ill. (TBR, 15) He catches a bad cold.
Coverdale’s seventeenth-century Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors, by contrast, viewed the far worse hardships that they encountered in the New World as divine chastisement to goad them on in their tireless effort to carve a city upon a hill out of a howling wilderness. The Pilgrims never doubted that Providence had ordained their journey, commanding them to be ever diligent and faithful to the task He had set before them. When William Bradford and company disembarked into “a hideous & desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men,” Bradford consoled his fellow Pilgrims that no sacrifice was too great to effect the designs of the Almighty. [viii]
Coverdale entertains no such heroic aspirations. “The greatest obstacle to being heroic,” he reflects, “is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; and the truest heroism is to resist doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.” (TBR, 15-16) He compares his situation in the farmhouse at Blithedale to that of his more resilient and pious forebears:
A family of the old Pilgrims might have swung their kettle over precisely such a fire as this, only, no doubt, a bigger one; and, contrasting it with my coal-grate, I felt so much the more that we had transported ourselves a world-wide distance from the society that shackled us at breakfast-time. (TBR, 18)
Coverdale seems at best only dimly aware of the irony of his remark. The indulgence and weakness of the nineteenth century, which Coverdale’s reluctance to forego the comfort of his rooms and his wish now to huddle before the warmth of the coal-grate exemplified, were, indeed, “a world-wide distance” from the commitment, perseverance, and faith of the seventeenth. By comparison to the world of the seventeenth century, the world of the nineteenth seems puny and insubstantial. Even the fire before which Coverdale warms himself is smaller.
Hawthorne extended the comparison by having Coverdale confess that the residents of Blithedale did not keep the Sabbath “as might have befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims and the Puritans.” Yet, he persuades himself that he and his companions have taken up the Pilgrims’ “high enterprise,… and were carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which they never dreamed of attaining.” (TBR, 140) Unlike the Puritans, who were humble in their devotion, the residents of Blithedale do not use the pulpit to voice their praise for God or beg forgiveness for their transgressions against Him. Instead, they announce their private grievances and invoke their preferred social and political theories. Zenobia, for instance, condemns the injustice that society has perpetrated against women. Hollingsworth, meanwhile, exalts philanthropy and, specifically, the need for prison reform. In short, these men and women are not interested in adhering to the will of God but only in advocating their personal vision of social good. They have forsaken the Kingdom of God to serve the Kingdom of Man. At best, they are charlatans, at worst, idolaters.
In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne condensed the primal myth of America: the withdrawal from a decadent and corrupt historical society and the entrance into a timeless, regenerative community. No matter that the basis of regeneration had shifted from theology in the seventeenth century to economics in the nineteenth. America was still destined to facilitate individual rebirth and social renewal. In that sense, perhaps, Coverdale tacitly supposes his rejection of society and his venture into the unknown to duplicate the journey that the Pilgrims and the Puritans made across the Atlantic to the New World. For the visionaries who gather at Blithedale find repugnant the possessive individualism and the economic competition that dominate contemporary American society and that, to their minds, signal the failure of the communitarian experiment on which the Pilgrims and the Puritans had long ago embarked. In their own way, they propose to rekindle that mission.
III.
The “little army of saints and martyrs” who, one by one, arrive at Blithedale are disgusted with the world as it is. (TBR, 74) Although unhappy and naïve, they are far from despairing. They remain confident that they can form an ideal community and have faith in the possibility of a better life. Coverdale’s description of them is the nearest approximation that the nineteenth century can provide to the stern and devout men and women of the seventeenth. “Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were among them,” Coverdale remarks, “sombre [sic] brows, but eyes that did not require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by the students’ lamplight, and hair that seldom showed a thread of silver.” (TBR, 75) Mature and serious, these men and women are in the prime of life. They are clear-eyed and display the youthful vigor needed to undertake the assignment they have set for themselves.
But Coverdale also glimpses a more troubling reality. The bond that unites these people is entirely negative. They are drawn together by hatred rather than by love. They agree about the corruption of American society and the importance of taking a second chance at life, but they disagree about the character of the new order that they are about to design:
Our band, 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 further. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity.
For a moment, Coverdale permits himself to hope that “between theory and practice, a true and available mode of life might be struck out; and that, should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in the trial would not have been wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the experience that makes men wise.” (TBR,76) But Coverdale can do nothing to conceal that the journey toward an earthly paradise has begun in confusion and discord.
“In their haste to begin the reformation of the world,” the inhabitants of Blithedale have failed to recognize that one of the curses of Adam’s sin plagues their Eden. They must work, earning their daily bread by the sweat of their brows. Coverdale has long suspected that the contemplation of paradise is distinct from the effort to invent it. Like Hawthorne, he disdains manual labor and the practical details that life demands, which leave little time or energy to attend to matters intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. The unavoidable necessity of work makes it impossible for Coverdale fully to embrace the utopian dream that Blithedale represents to so many. He is, for example, aghast during his first evening at Blithedale when Silas Foster, the proprietor, asks who is qualified to bargain for pigs. “Pigs! Good heavens!,” he exclaims, “had we come out from among the swinish multitudes for this?” (TBR, 27) As he and his comrades perform their daily round of chores, Coverdale becomes increasingly distressed. He repeats Hawthorne’s sentiments about the hazards of living at Brook Farm:
The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor. It was our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship…. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite as anticipated…. The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar–the yeoman and the man of the fine moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity–are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or wielded into one substance. (TBR, 79-80)
Blithedale may have been a paradise, the Garden of Eden reconstituted in America, but the residents wear themselves out trying to enter it and make it their own.
Despite all the toil and hardship, Coverdale considers aspirations to earthly perfection, however noble and inspiring, inherently false and destined to fail. Vowing to divorce themselves from greed, jealousy, and selfishness, those who have come to Blithedale mean to substitute the equitable distribution of labor for the ruthless exploitation of the working class. Cooperation will replace competition. This catalog of solemn resolutions parodies the socialist manifestos of the nineteenth century. Even as he questions the millennial possibilities that Blithedale embodies, Coverdale affirms that:
If ever men might lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions without dread of laughter or scorn….–yes, and speak of earthly happiness for themselves and mankind as an object to be hopefully striven for and probably attained–we…were those very men. We had left the rusty iron framework of society behind us; we had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary treadmill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stepped down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose–a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with its generosity–to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles of which human society had all along been based. (TBR, 25-26)
But Coverdale’s ambivalence and apprehension about the Blithedale experiment rest on his acceptance of the wickedness of others rather than himself–a wickedness that he fears will sooner or later afflict the Blithedale community and ruin its prospects.
He is right. Soon enough, competition and rivalry do supplant kindness, affection, and love when Silas Foster urges the residents to compete with the neighboring market-gardeners of Boston. A “new hostility” rather than “a new brotherhood” shapes their outlook and conduct. Instead of mutual affection, members of the community scorn those whom they regard as inferior. Coverdale, as it turns out, is not himself immune from such moral weaknesses. His zest for improvement is qualified by his reluctance to look foolish. His optimism about the future is qualified by his assurance that dreams can blossom only into failure. His charity toward his fellow man is qualified by his disinclination to trouble himself much in the service of others. In theory, it was the refusal to accept predatory competition that inspired the withdrawal to Blithdale. But there remains a jarring disjoint between the proclamations and the conduct of the members. Their unscrupulous egotism, unquenchable greed, and vaulting ambition show Blithedale to be a humbug, every bit as false and vicious as American society, only more hypocritical.
Admission that the dishonest rebel is more reprehensible than the original villain did not prompt Hawthorne to repudiate the conviction that exploitive individualism was “the common evil” which every American either suffered or perpetuated. The instinctive aversion that the men and women of Blithedale feel toward a society devoted to individualism, competition, and profits, a society in which there are winners and losers, is honorable and courageous. They decline to countenance any social, political, or economic arrangement that prevents all men and women from living decent and dignified lives. But like dirt clinging to uprooted plants, they carry with them all the vices they have deplored in others. The humane social order that they envision proves harder to achieve in practice than it is to defend in principle.
Blithedale becomes not so much a refutation of nineteenth-century American society as a reflection of it–of its attitudes, sensibilities, and prejudices. The façade of compassion and serenity conceals the deceit, selfishness, and anxiety that pervade the community. Hawthorne at last came to distrust not the values that the members espouse, but their commitment to abiding by them.
IV.
The attempt to begin life anew at Blithedale provides an opportunity that has already been lost, or an opportunity, perhaps, that never existed because it is beyond the capacity of human beings to effect. A minor poet and a petty, sometimes vindictive, man, Coverdale is also often well meaning (or believes himself to be so), but is too enamored of comfort, luxury, and pleasure to be much use to anyone. He is also unalterably attached to the pursuit of his own interests. He came to Blithedale more from boredom at an aimless life than from any determination to improve self and world. Toward the end of the novel, he asserts his willingness to die of a good cause, as long as the effort “did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble….. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battlefield for Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man for one brave rush upon the levelled bayonets. Further than that, I should be loathe to pledge myself.” (TBR, 287) Such an attitude denotes something less than a commitment to the welfare of humanity.
Earlier, Coverdale, although in denial, has exposed his character. He encounters Old Moodie who asks Coverdale to aid him in some unspecified enterprise. “If you please, Mr. Coverdale, you might do me a great favor.” At this request, Coverdale hesitates: “A very great one, repeated I, in a tone that must have expressed but little alacrity of beneficence, although I was ready to do the old man any amount of kindness involving no special trouble to myself. A very great favor, you say?” (TBR, 11) Wary of being rebuffed, Old Moodie withdraws the request, the nature and substance of which remain unknown. Coverdale’s reluctance to help another human being in need follows him to Blithedale. He cannot break with the past because he cannot jettison his inherent lethargy and his fundametnal selfishness.
Indifferent to the needs, and even to the well being, of others, Coverdale implicitly endorses the very aspects of the society that he and others went to Blithedale to escape. He is an arch-individualist who thinks first, last, and always of himself, avoiding any commitment that disturbs his comfort, pleasure, and equanimity. He has, ironically, already renounced the values he hoped to cultivate. Like Coverdale, Zenobia, with whom Coverdale becomes infatuated, is devoted only to herself. A dilettante and a coquette, she foresees little from her sojourn at Blithedale save a naughty frolic. She exhibits her celebrated beauty and her lurid sexuality like the “redundance [sic] of a personal ornament.” Her drawing room, which Coverdale visits on a brief return to Boston, is crowded with ornate furniture, colorful paintings, and gaudy knickknacks, “the fulfillment of every fantasy of an imagination reveling in various methods of costly self-indulgence and splendid ease.” (TBR, 194). In striking contrast to the rustic simplicity of the farmhouse at Blithedale, the room evokes luxury and conceit, vices deadly to the survival of a virtuous republic. Zenobia pays for her corruption, impurity, and unrequited passion, suffering a gruesome death by her own hand. Self-absorbed and detached from his fellow human beings, Coverdale arrives too late to save her. After her death, he relapses into a life without purpose, haunted by missed opportunities and lost dreams.
Lacking neither conviction nor energy, Westervelt and Hollingsworth are each in their own way diabolical characters. Professor Westervelt uses the esoteric power of mesmerism to accomplish a sinister purpose. [ix] Believing not in the power of God but in the power of the mind, Westervelt delineates both the failure of religion and the misuse of science. In his longing to probe the mysteries of nature, he violates the integrity of the mind, the personality, and the soul. Learned, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated, Westervelt is the finest representative of modern civilization. A clever wizard and a faithful servant of the devil, he is intent on exploiting other human beings, whom he bends to his will. “Human character was soft wax in his hands, and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see fit to mold it.” His serpent-head walking stick and the gold band encircling his false teeth show him to be “a moral and physical humbug.” (TBR, 114) A fraud, an illusionist, a confidence man, the cold-blooded, reptilian Westervelt (Hawthorne alternately describes him as a salamander and an unidentifiable creature, cold and slimy, that one accidentally touches in the darkness) is a false and evil messiah. There is nothing genuine about him. His human form was “a necromantic, perhaps a mechanical contrivance, in which a demon walked about.” (TBR, 220-21) Yet, his power, although exerted invisibly, is all too real.
Westervelt influences and directs as if by remote control, robbing his victims their agency. Under his spell, they become oblivious to reality and obey his commands to feel, think, and act as he wishes. He enslaves them while leaving them with the appearance of freedom. Like the residents of Blithedale, Westervelt confirms his faith in the future and speaks of a new era “dawning upon the world; an era that would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood.” But Westervelt speaks of this benevolent future “with a cold, dead materialism… as if it were a matter of chemical discovery.” There is nothing human about his vision. The new order would not be a community of men and women based on love. Rather, the it would “link soul to soul” in common bondage. (TBR, 234 )
As his Germanic-sounding name implies, Westervelt is a European villain. He conceals in himself all the crimes and sins of the Old World. A corrupt demagogue who speaks the language of freedom and love but who, in reality, prepares to deceive those who follow him, Westervelt defiles all that he touches and humiliates all who come under his despotic sway. He contributes to the destruction of Blithedale by perverting the spirit and undermining the faith of the community. He inspires a “sceptical [sic]and sneering view… in regard to all life’s better purposes … which degrades the high, debases the pure, deforms the beautiful:”
It must be a mind of uncommon strength, and little impressibility, that can permit itself the habit of such intercourse, and not be permanently deteriorated; and yet the Professor’s tone represented that of worldly society at large, where cold sceptisicm [sic] smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. (TBR, 121-22)
Coverdale does not have such a powerful and independent mind. He, too, is susceptible to Westervelt’s malign influence.
Hollinsgworth, by contrast, is an American villain whose misguided faith propels him into moral blindness about others and himself. Unlike Coverdale and so many of those who find their way to Blithedale, Hollingsworth is a doer not a dreamer, and he acts with deadly earnest. He does not want to construct a regenerate community but to build a model prison. His monomaniacal preoccupation with crime is the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Puritan absorption with sin. If Coverdale testifies to the ineffectiveness of American idealism, Hollingsworth offers a frightening reminder of what happens to a utopian vision when it is inextricably bound to a ruthless ego that will stop at nothing to attain its purpose, when, as Coverdale declares, “godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.” (TBR, 85) In his zeal, Hollingsworth has succumbed to the occupational disease that infects so many activists and reformers: the conviction of his inerrant righteousness.
“Icy for all human affection” (TBR, 121), Hollingsworth disclaims the communitarian ideal that originally animated Blithedale, making secret arrangements with Zenobia to finance his enterprise and seize control. He ignores Coverdale’s objection that he disclose his plot to the other members of the community and solicit their assent and compliance. Instead, he invites Coverdale to delude them further by joining in his subversion. Coverdale replies:
… have you no regrets, in overthrowing this fair system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply, and is now beginning to flourish so hopefully around us? How beautiful it is, and, so far as we can yet see, how practicable! The ages have waited for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on our mortal existence in love and mutual help! Hollingsworth, I would be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience. (TBR, 157-58)
Even if his reservations are only temporary, Coverdale for once sets aside his own interests and pleads with Hollingsworth to respect and preserve the soul of the community.
But Coverdale does not possess Hollingsworth’s monomaniacal determination. As a consequence, he must collaborate, yield, or be swept aside. The indomitable Hollingsworth bellows “then let it rest wholly upon mine!” (TBR, 158) When Coverdale once more makes it clear that he does not share Hollingsworth’s fanatical objectives, Hollingsworth disavows their friendship. Hollingsworth exhibited all the vices and none of the virtues of the Puritans. He is unkind in his personal relationships and dishonest in his public dealings. He proceeds by subterfuge. Once set on his course of action, he holds to it without deviation. Any who oppose or hinder him must be converted or removed. He operates without conscience and remorse. For Hollingsworth, reform was a mask for self-aggrandizement. He illustrates the selfishness, individualism, and the indifference to the welfare of others that has poisoned American society. A disillusioned Zenobia articulates the moral catastrophe for which Hollingsworth is singly responsible. “It is all self!” she cries. “Nothing else; nothing but self, self, self self!… I see it now! I am awake, disenchanted, disinthralled! [sic] Self, self, self! You have embodied yourself in a project….Your disguise is self-deception. See whither it has brought you!…Foremost, and blackest of your sins, you stifled down your inmost conscience!–you did a deadly wrong to your own heart!”[x] (TBR, 254)
At Blithedale, instead of community there is division. Instead of generosity there is selfishness. Instead of faith there is intrigue. Instead of truth there are lies. Instead of love there is hatred. The insurmountable obstacle in the way of success is the absence of a common bond that connects the men and women of Blithedale each to all. They could not reconcile the theory of sympathy and love with the reality of treachery and antagonism. “Everything was suddenly faded,” Coverdale discerns upon his return from Boston. (TBR, 164) Blithedale has by then become another battlefield in the permanent warfare that defines human interaction, replete with casualties.
V.
Miles Coverdale once speculated about who would be the first to die in the new Garden of Eden. He went so far as to devise a plan to convert part of Blithedale into a different kind of garden, which he called “Death’s garden-ground.”(TBR, 155) Gradually, he senses impending disaster. There are snakes in Eden (he is one of them) that will transform paradise into a wasteland; the whole of Blithedale is destined to become a graveyard as the colonists debase themselves and relinquish their ideals. “At every turn…,” Coverdale infers, “the thought stared me in the face that some evil thing had befallen us, or was ready to fall.” (TBR, 242) Zenobia’s suicide brings about the disaster that he fears.[xi] It is an occurrence at one tragic and vulgar. The calculated vulgarity in Hawthorne’s description of this sad event attests that a community rising from noble ideals has degenerated into the unimaginative and the banal: an outworn tale of scorned love followed by raging jealousy and a tawdry suicide. Zenobia’s fate illustrates the real tragedy of Blithedale and, by implication, of America itself. Both are unexceptional. They are just like every place else, with the residents subject to the same weaknesses, the same duplicity, the same perversion, the same miseries–all the foibles, transgressions, and sins that have beset humanity since time immemorial.
Like America, Blthedale is not the regenerate community that its citizens profess it to be. Hawthorne introduced the unsettling prospect that few, if any, may get a second chance at life. Few, if any, may enjoy an opportunity to recover lost dreams or to overcome past mistakes. Sins may be repented and forgiven. Mistakes and misjudgments, on the contrary, mock repentance. The effects continue to be felt long after the fact, notwithstanding regret and even remorse. The men and women who assemble at Blithedale, like Americans in general, are bound more by their mutual animosities than by the benevolent and loving sentiments to which they proclaim allegiance. Faced with the corruption that invariably ruins all visionary schemes, Hawthorne reasoned that not only the quest for perfection but also the possibility of significant improvement in human affairs is at best a dubious proposition. Nineteenth-century America belonged to the dark seductress Zenobia, the mendacious conjurer Westervelt, and the fanatical reformer Hollingsworth.
Even the best men and women cannot stand aside from the corrupt spirit of the age. Blithedale and America were alike doomed not as much to failure as to unreality. Hawthorne’s Blithedale, like Hawthorne’s America, has unreality inscribed into its very constitution. Blithedale is a fairy land posing as the real world. As he makes his way back to Blithedale, Coverdale imagines that there is “no such place,…and never had been….” It was “nothing but a dream-work and enchantment.” (TBR, 240) Neither Blithedale nor America can restrain human passion and human sinfulness. “Alas, my countrymen,” Coverdale laments, “methinks we have fallen on an evil age!… The soul of man is descending to a lower part than it has ever before reached while incarnate. We are pursuing a downward course in the eternal march…. (TBR, 232) “Considered in a profounder relation,” Blithedale, and, by implication, the American experiment itself, were “part of another age, a different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its aim and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into the current history which time was writing off.” (TBR, 173) But it falls to Zenobia to pronounce the epitaph:
I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery, in our effort to establish one true system…. It was, indeed, a foolish dream! Yet it gave us some pleasant summer days, and bright hopes, while they lasted. (TBR, 263-64)
Vague and intangible, distant now in time and space, Blithedale, like the Garden of America, was the new heaven and the new earth gone wrong. More disturbing, this unstable and disenchanted community in which nothing is as it seems may well have been no more than the product of a erratic and fevered imagination. Not quite a nightmare, it is nonetheless an unquiet dream.
After leaving Blithedale, Coverdale finds no place for himself in the real world. Superficial and false, his life passes not “happily,” but “tolerably enough.” (TBR, 286) He lives comfortably and dines well. He travels twice to Europe. He ceases to write poetry and spends most of his time in melancholy reminiscence about his days at Blithedale:
Often… in these years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer, appeared the prospect, that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a world! Were my former associates now there,–were there only three or four of those true-hearted men still laboring in the sun,–I sometimes fancy that I should direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to receive me, for old friendship’s sake. (TBR, 285)
But there is no one. They are all gone now, existing only in Coverdale’s memory.
Although he has at last come to accept life as it is, Coverdale is overwhelmed by sorrow and desolation. With the undeniable intrusion of reality, he has discarded the comforting illusion of power and emphasizes his inability, and perhaps a little of his former reluctance, to act, even with the consequent loss of meaning and purpose that results:
I am not at middle age–well, well, a step or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows it!–a bachelor, with no very decided purpose of being otherwise….Being well to do in the world, and having nobody but myself to care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare sumptuously everyday…. As regards human progress (In spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences,) let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose! If I could earnestly do either, it might be better for my comfort. As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose. How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very same ingredient, the want to which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an emptiness. (TBR, 286-87)
Coverdale’s desperate confession of love for Priscilla exposes the depth and extent of his impotence. He is in the end a solitary figure left to contemplate the wreckage of the past and the dreariness of the future. He can do nothing to change either. His love for Priscilla may be the saddest admission of all in a world rife with broken promises and missed opportunities that proffers no second chances.
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Notes:
[i] The scholarly literature on The Blithedale Romance is vast. This listing is hardly exhaustive, but will provide interested readers with a basis for further study of the novel. Kent Bales, “The Allegory and the Radical Romance Ethic of The Blithedale Romance, American Literature 46 (March 1974), 41-53; Nina Baym, “The Blithedale Romance: A Radical Reading,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67 (1968), 545-69; Lauren Berlant, “Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance,”American Literary History 1/1 (Spring 1989), 30-62; Brian M. Britt, “The Veil of Allegory in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance,” Literature and Theology 10/1 (March 1996), 44-57; Bill Christopherson, “Behind the White Veil: Self-Awareness in Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance,”Modern Language Studies 12/2 (Spring 1982), 81-92; Frank Davidson, “Toward a Revaluation of The Blithedale Romance, New England Quarterly 25 (September 1952), 374-83; Edgar A. Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 71-80; John C. Hirsch,“The Politics of Blithedale: The Dilemma of Self,” Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972), 138-46; Gordon Hunter, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels, Chapter 3 (Athens, GA, 1988); Claudia C. Johnson, “Hawthorne and Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism,” American Literature 44 (January 1973), 585-95; Roy R. Male, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision (New York, 1964); Richard H. Millington, “American Anxiousness: Selfhood and Culture in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, The New England Quarterly 63/4 (December 1990), 558-83; Byron L. Stay, “Hawthorne’s Fallen Puritans: Eliot’s Pulpit in The Blithedale Romance,” Studies in the Novel 18 (Fall 1986), 283-90; Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 188-208.
[ii] Brelant, “Fantasies of Utopia,” 30-32; Britt, “The Veil of Allegory,” 45, 48. On the history of Brook Farm, see Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge, MA, 2004) and Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden ( Ithaca, NY, 1997).
[iii] Elizabeth Peabody, “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” The Dial (October 1841), 214, 218. See also Peabody,”Plan of the West Roxbury Community,” The Dial (January 1842), 361-72; Mark Gallagher, “Elizabeth Peabody, Brook Farm, and the Heaven of Association,” 205-20, in Jennifer McFarlane-Harris and Emily Hamilton-Honey, eds. Nineteenth-Century American Women and Theologies of the Afterlife (New York, 2021); Christopherson, “Behind the White Veil,” 84.
[iv] Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Chicago, 1907), 20-21. Hawthorne signed his letters “Thy Lovingest Husband,” although he did not marry Sophia Peabody until July 9, 1842. See Leland S. Person, The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne (Cambridge, UK, 2007), 3.
[v] Love Letters, 26.
[vi] “Passages From Hawthorne’s Notebooks (Part XI),” The Atlantic Monthly (November 1866), 536-44. The quoted passages appear on 541 and 542.
[vii] Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Boston, 1852), 46. Hereafter cited in the text as TBR. See Male, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision, 141; Chrisopherson, “Behind the White Veil,” 81.
[viii] William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, ed. by Charles Deane (Boston, 1856), 78.
[ix] By the 1840s, the theories of the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) had become popular throughout Europe and the United States. Mesmer argued that an invisible fluid surrounded, penetrated, and linked all bodies in the universe. Even before his death, an eclectic, spiritualist form of Mesmerism that combined magic, seances, somnambulism, and hypnotism similar to the practices that Hawthorne describes in the novel had obscured Mesmer’s contributions to science and philosophy. See James Wychoff, Franz Anton Mesmer: Between God and the Devil (Hoboken, NJ., 1975).
[x] Millington, “American Anxiousness,” 558.
[xi] Britt, “The Veil of Allegory,” 52-53; Christopherson, “Behind the White Veil,” 88-89; Millington, “American Anxiousness,” 570.
The featured image is “New England Farm in Winter” (after 1850), by anonymous, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.