The Blithedale Romance Page 3
Throughout The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne keeps us conscious of the fact that it is always and only Miles Coverdale’s version of events to which we are privy. What we are offered is what Coverdale sees (or thinks he sees), knows (or thinks he knows), and chooses to tell. But not even when we are given supposedly direct observation can we always be certain of the truth of the matter. When Coverdale tells us that he “plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth,” for example, we wonder at the laggard narrator’s suddenly unobstructed view where, just a moment before, he had complained of branches hanging so low over the path “as partly to conceal the figures that went before.” Credulity is further strained when we are offered only speculations and impressions—as when, upon returning to Blithedale, Coverdale arrives too late to witness the final confrontation between Zenobia, Hollingsworth, and Priscilla. Here we have only the narrators “impression that a crisis had just come and gone.” But precisely “what subjects had been discussed”—this we can never know for certain. We are left then—as so often in the text—to Coverdale’s “conjectures.”
To be sure, we start out by trusting Coverdale. The youthful Coverdale seems an evenhanded fellow, possessed of a social conscience. Not credulous enough to be taken in by the contrived stage effects of the Veiled Lady, he nevertheless is willing to puzzle out her sibylline utterances. Optimistic enough to have joined the Blithedale experiment in the first place, he is not so blinded by that optimism as to remit the imperfections and disappointments of the place. Even though he admits having entertained doubts about committing himself to the enterprise, even though he displays “but little alacrity of beneficence” to old Moodie, we tend to accept the youthful protagonist as an admirable, well-meaning chap, while we respect the honesty of the “frosty bachelor” telling his story.
As the narrative progresses, however, we find ourselves increasingly impatient with some of Coverdale’s speculations. When he begins his ongoing reflection upon Zenobia’s sexuality, for example, Coverdale intuits that she has been married, but then adds that “the idea ... was unauthorized by any circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears.” He repeats, “There was not the slightest foundation in my knowledge for any surmise of the kind.” That said, by the end of the novel, Coverdale all but takes it as fact not only that Zenobia has been married, but that she was thereby irrevocably connected to Westervelt.
In retelling Moodie’s life history, Coverdale at least owns up to employing “a trifle of romantic and legendary license.” But it is no mere “trifle,” we find. Having admitted that the details of the final interview between Moodie and his daughter Zenobia are “unknown to me,” Coverdale shows himself steadfastly unwilling “to lose the picturesqueness of the situation.” And so, for the sake of narrative completeness—if not with regard to verity—Coverdate proceeds to sketch the interview “mainly from fancy.”
Somewhere in all this, most readers become something more than impatient with a story, like Mrs. Foster’s “substantial sock,” apparently being forged “out of the texture of a dream.” Beyond impatience, they find themselves at odds with the conclusions that Coverdale is drawing from his limited observations and seemingly unlimited fantasies. Thus, without ever directly intruding himself into the text, Hawthorne effectively erodes the reader’s initial trust in the narrator and leads us to wonder “whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a speculative man.” In consequence, an offhand remark of the narrator’s, an idle speculation that seems to contradict some earlier rumination, or even Coverdale’s compulsion “to detect the final fitness of incident to character, and distil ... the whole morality of the performance”—any or all of these will make us ask what other interpretations of the events are possible and what manner of man is telling this story, and why.
First and foremost, both the young Coverdale at Blithedale and, ten years or more later, the frosty bachelor narrating the tale identify themselves as poets (though the narrator claims to have “given it up”). The young Coverdale hopes to translate his Blithedale experience into verses and ballads, and for that purpose he casts himself as the “one calm observer” who will watch and make sense of it all. What foils him at the time, apparently, is the irrefutable fact that “real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance.” Zenobia and Westervelt do not stop in the woodland so that they may be overheard by him. Conversations and confrontations do not often coincide with his presence. If as he lived them, then, the events at Blithedale afforded only inadequate material for the “true, strong, natural” poetry Coverdale had hoped to compose there, his later incarnation has nonetheless managed to shape from these same events one of the most haunting romances of American literature. What a chaotic and multifaceted reality could not supply, imagination will. Now unfettered by daily ties to the place or to its inhabitants, and with the bonds of memory loosened, an older Miles Coverdale broods “over our recollections” and creates the romance that life would not. Memory thus fades indistinguishably into invention and “what I seem to remember,” the narrator confesses, “I yet suspect may have been patched together by my fancy, in brooding over the matter, afterwards.”
Granted, then, that Miles Coverdale has always been possessed by the artist’s compulsion to distill a moral and create a coherent narrative from the fragments of experience, a crucial question remains: Why this story, why this particular interpretation of events? As Coverdale himself suggests when he warns us against “the kind of error into which my mode of observation was calculated to lead me,” the answer lies in the psychology and emotional makeup of the man.
From the first, Coverdale stands apart from the rest of the communitarians. Somewhat vaguely agreeable “to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any farther,” he admits to no great liking “for the written constitution under which our millennium had commenced.” Financially independent, he knows nothing of Priscilla’s need for protection and shelter. Wary of seeming a fool, he can harbor no vision like Hollingsworth’s. And though not unsympathetic to feminist concerns, he feels no need and proposes no plan—as does Zenobia—for setting men and women upon a different course of relation. On the contrary, his life of indolent indulgence, his evenings “at the billiard-club, the concert, the theatre,” and his “pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted,” had satisfied him “well enough.” Neither personal urgency nor passionate political commitment, we quickly understand, compelled Coverdale to Blithedale.
Still, we honor his attempt to assert a social conscience in that remove, even as we note his limited capacity to do so. Congratulating himself for once having “had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny—yes!—and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment,” Coverdale the narrator humorously reveals what his younger self was made of. He could act on his generous hopes “even to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and travelling ... through a drifting snow-storm.” It is a cramped capacity for heroism, at best.
As we get to know him better, we see that Coverdale’s incapacity to risk himself in action is part and parcel of a personality incapable of retaining any “mental vision in regard to all life’s better purposes.” In this, to his dismay, he finds himself aligned with the “cold scepticism” of the hated Westervelt. “A part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him,” Coverdale reluctantly admits. On one occasion, he tries to blame Westervelt’s recent conversation for bringing on his own sudden “mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world.” But these doubts do not issue from Coverdale only when he is in Westervelt’s presence. Repeatedly in the narrative, these are the doubts of the youthful communitarian and the “old bachelor” narrator alike.
Indeed, although the frosty bachelor sometimes distinguishes himself from the youth of his story, in the end the two are different only in degree, never in kind. To emphasize that essential continuity,
Hawthorne plants echoes of the younger man’s exchanges with Moodie and Westervelt in the older narrator’s closing rumination on joining the liberation armies of Lajos Kossuth. As he considers the Hungarian leader’s 1848 rebellion against Austrian rule over Hungary, Coverdale seems to appreciate the virtue of the deed. But, as in earlier passages, he declares he can commit himself only if “the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble.” Lest the reader miss this echo, Hawthorne follows it by having the old bachelor assure us that, in fact, he is not “altogether changed from the young man” he once was. The point Hawthorne would have us grasp here is that Coverdale has neither learned from nor been changed fundamentally by the events at Blithedale. He has simply allowed his experience of the place to justify all his initial youthful doubts and hesitations. And he has constructed his narrative so as to confirm his present fixed belief that any vision “worth the having ... is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.”
As he presents himself in his narrative, Coverdale could conjure an imaginary theater in his head, populate it with those about him, but then refuse any role other than that of passively observant chorus. He could refuse Hollingsworth’s entreaties but then fail to reveal Hollingsworth’s designs to the threatened community. He could mentally undress Zenobia, but he closed his eyes against “her womanliness incarnated.” Belatedly, he claims all along to have loved Priscilla, but we cannot imagine him—like Hollingsworth—calling her from the mesmerist’s trance. As he harks back to these events, the distance of the years affords the narrator a clearer view of his own makeup. He now knows himself never to have numbered among those who earnestly believe and aid in schemes for “human progress.” What he does not forthrightly acknowledge —but everywhere demonstrates—is that he is also a man who has never known either passion or passionate commitment. And yet this is the man who would chronicle passionate people in a community dedicated to idealistic notions of human improvement.
For all of Coverdale’s efforts to unveil the secrets of his friends’ lives, and for all his attempts to probe the import of their actions, we finally suspect that he has always been constrained in his observations by a fundamental lack of sympathy with those he would understand. As a man like Coverdale is capable of apprehending them, socialists attempting a communal farm must seem like latter-day Arcadians affecting a picnic; a dedicated philanthropist must ever appear obsessive; feminist outrage will derive not from principle but from personal injury; and a female suicide will always take her life as a result of unrequited love for a man, rather than remorse for injuries done a sister. Ironically, we recall this narrator’s single expression of real sympathy at Blithedale—his responsiveness to the skeptic, Westervelt.
To put the matter another way: Despite his youthful flirtation with idealism, Coverdale is no idealist. Despite his vague protestations against “false and cruel principles,” he is no social reformer. And despite his consuming interest in the moral obligations of Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla to one another, he may not himself be a morally adequate man. What he does prove himself to be is a consummate creator of imagined fictions. As such, he serves Hawthorne less as a vehicle through which to explore aspects of social idealism and more as a measure of a certain kind of artistic temperament.
V
The notebooks in which Hawthorne jotted down his daily observations and ruminations, along with his collected private correspondence, indicate a mind not unaware of but nonetheless profoundly detached from the great social issues and political passions of his day. His brief sojourn at Brook Farm represents his only foray into reformist activism, and it appears to have been prompted as much by a desire to locate a home for himself and his wife-to-be as by any conscious commitment to the socialist experiment itself. Analogously, The Blithedale Romance stands as Hawthorne’s only major work to treat contemporary social issues in anything other than symbolic rendering. But even this, he would have us understand, is intended to convey no theory or conclusion, “favorable or otherwise, in respect to Socialism.”
We are not unwarranted, therefore, in seeing similarities between Coverdale and his creator, Hawthorne. Both had acquired the habit of contemplative observation, and both men apparently preferred the dramas of their private mental theaters to any protracted involvement in the social and political dramas of the antebellum decades. But these similarities are overshadowed by differences. Where Miles Coverdale could only belatedly confess his love for Priscilla, Nathaniel Hawthorne passionately wooed and then wed Sophia Peabody, enjoying unblemished domestic happiness until his death in 1864. Where Coverdale feels that his life “has come to rather an idle pass,” even to the extent of his giving up poetry, Hawthorne continued to write and publish actively after his year at Brook Farm. And where Coverdale visited Europe only for diversion, Hawthorne first lived in Europe as United States Consul at Liverpool (1853-57), appointed by his former college friend President Franklin Pierce.
The most significant difference between creator and character, however, derives from the fact that Hawthorne could contemplate interpretations unavailable to a mind like Coverdale’s. In what is surely the prototype for Coverdale’s recovery of the drowned Zenobia, Hawthorne also once steered a boat onto a river in an effort to help recover the drowned body of a young woman suicide. His journal entry for July 1845 contains much of Coverdale’s horror at the discoloration and rigidity that mark such a corpse. But where Coverdale could see in the event only the distraction of a woman’s unrequited love for a man, Hawthorne perceived the nineteen-year-old Concord, Massachusetts, schoolmistress’s frustration at the limitations imposed upon her by her class and sex. “She died for want of sympathy,” he explained in his journal, “her family being an affectionate one, but uncultivated, and incapable of responding to her demands.” Though perhaps for different reasons, a corresponding want of sympathy might also be attributed to Zenobia’s life—but Coverdale never grasped that interpretive possibility.
Coverdale, then, is neither Hawthorne’s spokesman nor an incarnation of his beliefs and attitudes. As a fellow artist and romancer, and as a fleeting reflection of some of Hawthorne’s propensities, he did nonetheless afford Hawthorne the occasion to examine—indeed, anatomize—selected elements of the writer’s own mental makeup. What we discover through the story that emerges—and possibly what Hawthorne discovered in the process of composition—is that the particular habits of mind held up for scrutiny here necessarily shape themselves into a morally ambiguous narrative voice. Driven only by “a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all my story,” and despite his many premonitions of disaster about to unfold there, Coverdale returns to Blithedale filled with “a wild exhilaration.” The storyteller, in short, has overwhelmed the man of warmhearted fellow-feeling.
There is a price to be paid for such selfish withdrawals from engagement and commitment, however, and Hawthorne uses “Miles Coverdale’s Confession” as the closing tally. Because Coverdale could not “pledge himself, for life and eternity,” to anyone or to any enterprise, he suffers the doom of Theodore in Zenobia’s legend, never tasting “another breath of happiness!” The frosty bachelor-narrator flings back only an “unsatisfied retrospect” on his life and, more than a decade after the event, he still confesses to “irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences.” Like Theodore, in other words, Coverdale is haunted by that single moment in his own history when all things seemed possible; but when, like Theodore (“whose natural tendency was towards scepticism”), he proved neither brave nor true enough.
The single triumph (if we may call it a triumph) that Hawthorne allows his character is the composition of the narrative at hand. It is, to be sure, a consummate achievement. But as the only story Coverdale is now capable of telling, it is, sadly enough, a chronicle of failure and betrayal, emanating from a man whose “own life [is] all an emptiness.” In Hawthorne’s tally, it would seem, there is a terrible price to be paid for the skepticism that precludes idealistic comm
itment and for the reticence that inhibits passion. In Coverdale’s epitaph for Blithedale, therefore, we hear also Hawthorne’s comment on Coverdale, the communal experiment and the fictional character alike both “dying ... for ... infidelity to its own higher spirit.”
ANNETTE KOLODNY
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Examples of the critical appraisals and reappraisals accorded Hawthorne’s work from his own time through the 1960s are available in B. Bernard Cohen, ed., The Recognition of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selected Criticism Since 1828 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969) and in J. Donald Crowley, ed., Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (New York, 1970). The Nor-ton Critical Edition of The Blithedale Romance (New York, 1978), Seymour Gross and Rosalie Murphy, eds., provides useful excerpts from Hawthorne’s journals and letters as well as samplings from contemporary reviews and modern critical analyses of the novel.
Because nothing short of a comprehensive bibliography can do justice to the wealth and variety of Hawthorne criticism and scholarship since World War II, the following short list offers only a small cross section of this work, with particular reference to The Blithedale Romance.
Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976).
Britt, Brian M. “The Veil of Allegory in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance,” Literature and Theology, 10.1 (1996), 44-57.
Brodhead, Richard H. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago, 1976).
Bumas, E. Shaskan. “ ‘The Forgotten Art of Gayety’: Masquerade, Utopia, and the Complexion of Empire,” Arizona Quarterly, 59.4 (2003), 1-30.
Cary, Louise D. “Margaret Fuller as Hawthorne’s Zenobia: The Problem of Moral Accountability in Fictional Biography,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 4.1 (1990), 31-48.