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The Trial of Nature: An Analysis of The Blithedale Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Stanton
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Extract

Is Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance chiefly the story of Hollingsworth and his unsuccessful philanthropic scheme, or the story of Zenobia and her tangled relations with Hollingsworth, Priscilla, Westervelt, and Old Moodie, or the story of Coverdale, the cold observer, or the story of the Blithedale experiment? Any of these candidates could be defended. Hollingsworth has the strongest effect upon the plot, and Hawthorne originally intended to name the novel after him; Zenobia is the most vivid character, and her story receives even more space than Hollingsworth's; Coverdale is the character whom we know most intimately; and although Hawthorne prefatorially states that his description of the communal farm “is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance,” his remarks about Blithedale's purpose, operation, and failure constitute an evaluation of the Brook Farm experiment. Yet none of these sub-plots clearly dominates the rest. Unless some principle of unity holds them together, Blithedale is at best a noble failure; until we are aware of this principle of unity, we cannot read the novel with satisfaction.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 5 , December 1961 , pp. 528 - 538
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 528 “Toward a Revaluation of The Blithedale Romance,” NEQ, xxv (Sept. 1952), 374–383.

Note 2 in page 528 Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light & the Dark (Norman, Okla., 1952), p. 161; Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 188; Von Abele, The Death of the Artist (Netherlands, 1955), pp. 71, 72; Crews, “A New Reading of The Blithedale Romance,” AL, xxix (May 1957), 147–170; Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Tex., 1957), p. 139; Levin, The Power of Blackness (N. Y., 1958), p. 90; Turner, ed., The Blithedale Romance (N. Y., 1958), p. 14.

Note 3 in page 528 Politics and the Novel (N. Y., 1957), p. 174.

Note 4 in page 529 “Spirit” (and such related forms as “spiritual,” “spir-itualization,” and “unspiritual”) appears about fifty times; “Nature” appears ten times capitalized, twenty-two times uncapitalized. Even in vague, general senses, “nature” almost never appears in connection with spiritual characters, nor “spirit” with materialistic characters.

Note 5 in page 529 Arlin Turner notes that it touches upon “communal living, social, economic, and political theories, humanitarian-ism, woman's rights, reform movements, mesmerism, spiritualism, authorship,” p. 14.

Note 6 in page 529 Nature, in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Selections (New York, 1934), p. 40.

Note 7 in page 530 “The Everlasting No,” Sartor Resartus (New York, 1937), p. 164.

Note 8 in page 530 Cf. Emerson's “[Man] cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit,” Nature, p. 48.

Note 9 in page 530 Fogle notes that Priscilla represents faith and the heart, pp. 160, 146; Levin points out that “Zenobia personifies the flesh” and Priscilla is “the personification of spirit,” p. 89.

Note 10 in page 530 The Blithedale Romance, pp. 595–596, 371. All parenthetical page references are to the Riverside Edition, ed. G. P. Lathrop (Boston, 1883).

Note 11 in page 531 P. 347. Hyatt Waggoner has shown that the fires in Blithedale form an important and complex symbolic pattern, pp. 181–189.

Note 12 in page 532 P. 354. “… in The Blithedale Romance each of the major characters is, to some extent, damned or saved in accordance with his relationship to Priscilla”—Virginia Ogden Bird-sail, “Hawthorne's Fair-Haired Maidens: The Fading Light,” PMLA, lxxv (June 1960), 250.

Note 13 in page 533 This remark is also ironic: the virgin traditionally rendered the dragon helpless.

Note 14 in page 534 Cf. Emerson's recognition that idealism may dissolve Nature into a mere phantom: “I have no wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest,” Nature, p. 40.

Note 15 in page 534 As evidence of the novel's plot-parallels, note that the first statement that the farmers are imitating Fourier appears immediately after this scene, p. 466.

Note 16 in page 536 Waggoner, pp. 192–194; Male, pp. 151–153; Turner, pp. 18–23.

Note 17 in page 536 Turner, p. 18.

Note 18 in page 537 The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York, 1927), p. 26.

Note 19 in page 537 Waiden: Or Life in the Woods (New York, 1946), pp. 185, 193.

Note 20 in page 537 Birdsall, pp. 250–256.

Note 21 in page 538 “There is a sense in which it may be said that what finally emerges from the novel most vividly is death”—Waggoner, p. 193.

Note 22 in page 538 Waggoner, p. 190; Male, p. 139.