Politics and Romance: Hawthorne’s Blithedale

‘Utopia’ means ‘no place’ as well as ‘good place,’ so founding one outside book would require giving no place, negating the airy nothingness of imagination. If you can dream it, you can do it, utopians say. Realists reply, Why so? and utopians answer, Why not? The problem with the question, ‘Why not?’ is its openness; an evil man can pose it as easily as good one. One should deal circumspectly with utopians.

Nathaniel Hawthorne prefaces The Blithedale Romance circumspectly, with a ‘cover’ story. [1] Although Blithedale (‘Happy Valley’) resembles the Brook Farm commune founded in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1840, Hawthorne professedly does not intend “to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism” (633). Hawthorne invites his readers to think undogmatically about a political dogma. He claims a purely literary reason for selecting this no-place for his setting. An “American romancer” needs “an atmosphere of strange enchantment” not easily found in his matter-of-fact commercial republic. Brook Farm/Blithedale was just such a place, “essentially a day-dream, and not yet a fact”—”an available foothold between fiction and reality” (674). By so characterizing the Roxbury utopia, Hawthorne quietly puts its founders (himself included) in their place, while saying nothing to provoke ideological antagonism. To thoughtful readers he uncovers himself as a politic man.

His apologia leads such readers to wonder, Why be a “romancer” at all? Why not be novelist who stays closer to hard facts? Or a journalist, or an essayist? the author selects the genre, not the other way around. Hawthorne wrote in a variety of genres. Why choose this one?

To write astringently about Brook Farm in 1852, a decade or so after living there, would have exposed Hawthorne to hazards akin to the political speaker who engages in ‘personalities.’ Moreover, although Brook Farm had faded away by 1852, reform politics had strengthened, at least in New England; abolitionism, women’s rights, pacifism, and prohibition (of alcohol and even tobacco, a crop harvested by slaves) all had their fervent champions, many of whom endorsed all of those reforms more or less at once. The collision of romanticism with American politics would precipitate such controversy as might end in violence. A head-on critique, a polemic or word-war, would only exacerbate tensions. A prudent man might prefer indirection. A sort of romance novel—with its vivid characters, men who aspire to heroism, ladies with mysterious pasts, love repressed and expressed—might neutralize romantic toxins with romantic and mock-romantic anti-toxins. A romance after all will hold the attention of romantic souls first of all; a certain sort of romance might cure them of romantic excesses. Can there be a prudent romance?

Finally, does political life itself not have a touch of romance in it, even in the sobersided commercial republic? He would rule by ballots rather than bullets needs to tell a story about himself in order to get elected; he needs to become Old Tippecanoe, Dr. New Deal, or the Man from Hope. Even the regime of enlightened self-interest runs also on stirring fictions and semi-fictions that make an election seem more than the usual rat race. Hawthorne in his preface shows himself both politic with respect to his circumstances nd understanding with respect to American politics, indeed politics generally.

He divides his romance into twenty-nine chapters, narrated by a man whose name, Miles Coverdale, incorporates covering or masking. Scholars have noticed that a dale or valley symbolizes the human heart in Hawthorne’s fiction; Mr. Covered-heart will tell us about the no-place of Happy Heart, in a romance by a writer with a cover story. As for “Miles,” it suggests distance; Coverdale characteristically distances himself, does not fully participate in life real or utopian, in order to see clearly, and to consider what he sees. His watchfulness adds nothing to his popularity, to his political effectiveness in a democratic society, but it does make him a more plausible than any whole-souledly political actor would be.

Inasmuch as the word ‘utopia’ invites one to think about place, one may group the chapters here according to the place in which the narrator resides. Coverdale walks miles back and forth between Boston and Blithedale. The first and final chapters complement one another; each is set in the city. The second and fourth chapter groups (chapters 2-15 and chapters 24-28) describe the narrator’s stays in the countryside commune. The central group of chapters see Coverdale in the city. The city, Boston, means politics and commerce; the country commune founds itself on principles opposed to American commercial republicanism, albeit not entirely opposed to all American impulses, particularly in New England: Many critics have noticed in the Blithedalers the American Puritan and even American Enlightenment urge to secede from a corrupt old world and start anew. [3] Americans need to distinguish among secessions. Some are reasonable, some merely passion-driven, factitious.

The first chapter, “Old Moodie,” contrasts with the last chapter, “Miles Coverdale’s Confession.” Each title points to a man. Old Moodie, an eccentric partly masked by an eye-patch, accosts the bachelor-poet Coverdale, whom Moodie knows to be ready to take up residence at Blithedale. Old Moodie almost but not quite asks Coverdale to do him “a very great favor,” unspecified, then reconsiders and demurs. His secret, a story of love gone very wrong, counterbalances the self-uncovering of Coverdale’s own futile love in chapter 29. Like politics, so often fueled by libido dominandi, romantic love lends itself to covering, to stratagem, to subterfuge. Aristotle sees that the love of man and woman can yield a family, then link with other families to form clans, tribes, villages, and finally the political community. Modern romantic love complicates the very foundation of political life by democratizing it, so to speak. By making marriage a love-match, it introduces the complexities of the lovers’ assent, and consequently their passions, into the very foundations of the city, where before the young had done their fathers’ bidding in sustaining the family founded by distant ancestors. Coverdale himself seems to have no family. Not only has he no wife or children, he seems not to have parents or relations of any sort. He is a man without connections, if not qualities. If Coverdale is young man so to speak without parents, Old Moodie will turn out to be a father so to speak without children, a man who sired but did not really father two daughters who find themselves living together for the first time at Blithedale. Blithedale is indeed utopia, a no-place populated in part not by fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, but by ‘consenting adults’ whose real families are nowhere to be seen. [4] They are social atoms who suppose themselves to oppose commercial republicanism with communitarianism, the “blithe tones of brotherhood” (641), but in fact exaggerate or caricature its individualism. Blithedale is, as one chapter title calls it, “a modern Arcadia,” and thus no Arcadia at all.

Blithedale as No-Place
The first group of chapters, set in Blithedale, find Coverdale’s attention quickly focused on two women and one man. [5] Zenobia’s name and nature belie the ostensible egalitarianism of communitarianism conceived democratically. “Zenobia” is a pen name, “a sort of mask” (637), for a feminist literary lioness with “something imperial” about her: “However humble looked her new philosophy, [she] had as much native pride as any queen would have known what to do with” (642-643). She’s taken her name from the third-century queen of Palmyra, whom we meet in Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [6] Such spiritedness by nature precludes social and political equality from the start. Such a one must rule, ruin, or be ruined. At the founding of paradisiacal Blithedale, she is both Eve (646-647) and Pandora (652), unwittingly bringing evils. [7] That commercial-republican America can produce a Zenobia, the type of an Oriental despot, poses a problem that Blithedale utopianism cannot cure, one that the great commercial republic itself can only ‘kill.’ That commercial-republican America can produce a Zenobia also suggests the limits even carefully-designed political institutions and the way of life they reinforce can have over some human souls—bad news for good-place aspirations.

The other woman, young and wan, is carried in out of the snowstorm half-frozen. Eventually discovered as Zenobia’s half-sister, offspring of Old Moodie’s second marriage, Priscilla arrives masked or veiled as it were, wrapped in a cloak against the cold. Anything but imperial, she attaches herself to Zenobia, seeking and needing protection and just rule. A natural rank-order establishes itself on the first day of Coverdale’s stay at Blithedale.

The man, Hollingsworth (his worth will indeed finally sound hollow, not holy, when tested), tends Coverdale patiently when the poetaster takes ill, less out of compassion than to attach an ally by the cords of obligation. The only Blithedalian to ask a blessing in prayer, he prays not for the successful founding of Blithedale. Hollingworth subverts the commune even more radically than Zenobia does, coming to it not as a citizen but as a revolutionary under cover. Hollingsworth wants to turn Blithedale into the site of a reformatory for criminals, and in his monomaniacal reformism he cares for Coverdale “only for the ulterior purpose of making me a proselyte to his views” (681). He seeks co-conspirators for a bloodless coup d’état, a revolution to replace the revolutionary experiment the others have consented to undertake. Declaiming vehemently against the French socialist Fourier, who would build socialism upon selfishness (677), he mistakes his own “terrible egoism” for “an angel of God” (679). Hollingworth had worked as a blacksmith; Hephaestus numbered among the gods Zeus charged with the creation of Pandora. Hephaestus is a sort of father to Pandora. Blithedale’s Pandora, Zenobia, and her half-sister both fall in love with Hollingsworth. Their love for a superficially strong megalomaniac derives from their real father’s failure to father.

Sickness (and by implication death) takes some of the blitheness out of the dale. Imagery of cold and marble prefigure death at Blithedale (664). Coverdale’s suggestion to build a cemetery gets brushed aside; the residents of Happy Valley want no part of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Sickness and death put natural limits on utopia. So does work. After recovering from his illness, Coverdale quickly finds that the community needs a sort of foreign policy, a way of competing economically with the city (649). A true no-place—the just city of Plato’s Republic, for example—need not worry about foreigners, but this no-place is placed, and so must. To compete, it needs workers, not poets or feminist tractarian-orators, and Coverdale does work, hard, experiencing for the first time, he later sees, “the curse of Adam’s posterity” (688-689). In any real place, a life balancing work and leisure proves nearly impossible. The curse of Adam’s posterity is here in the new Paradise; merely communalizing labor does nothing to lift that curse. Blithedale’s egalitarianism precludes even the very limited leisure seen in Socrates’ utopia, restricted to the philosopher-kings and compromised even for them because they must take the time to rule their inferiors. there will never be a ‘synthesis’ of democracy nd utopia. The cure for the ills of utopianism is not more democracy.

Modern science gives intellectual and even some moral authority to the modern commercial republic, assisting citizen in their quest for the conquest of nature in order to procure self-preservation and comfort. But the Promethean technology that enables citizens to dispense with slaves has yet to enable commercial republicans to work less hard, although they do work less with their bodies. For all its rhetoric of Enlightenment, modern science covers a heart that beats for power, not liberty. In Boston, Coverdale had seen an exhibition of clairvoyance—forward-seeing, literally pro-methean—starring The Veiled Lady, a covered, mysterious figure whom Coverdale calls “one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science, or the revival of an old humbug” (635). In replacing the authority of God (in Enlightenment terms, priestcraft) with the authority of science, we must still ask: Is the latest modern marvel a produce of science or of quackery, real knowledge or clever sham? [8]  The Veiled Lady’s partner is a Professor Westervelt (‘Western-world’), a Satanic mesmerist who later slithers into mock-Edenic Blithedale, confiding truths and lies. The main truths: that Hollingsworth cares less for Zenobia than for the money she can donate to his projected reformatory (this, to Coverdale); that Priscilla is the Veiled Lady and Zenobia’s half-sister (this, to his ex-lover, Zenobia). The main lie: his very being, which uses truth cynically, to rule or, failing that, to ruin. Westervelt lives in the shadow-world of the Enlightenment project, seeing that if science can conquer nature the appearance of science, a mask of scientism, can gull citizens to consent to tyranny. Both sisters, without the natural protection of a fatherly father, have at different times succumbed to Westervelt’s half-real, half-fraudulent charms—modest Priscilla to the charm of his mesmerism, the erotic and spirited Zenobia to the charms of his body. Mesmerism combines a sort of science with a sort of rhetoric; Westervelt’s personal beauty is artificially enhanced with false teeth and fancy clothes.

As for the fourth character, the narrator himself, in the first set of Blithedale chapters he reveals more than he knows. Coverdale reveals himself as a modern and democratized man, a being of denatured manliness, “a devoted epicure of [his] own emotions” (760). Of his Blithedale foray he rightly says, near the outset, “the greatest obstacle to being heroic”—to being a man in full—”is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove oneself a fool; the truest wisdom is to resist the doubt; the profoundest wisdom is to know when it ought to be resisted, and when obeyed” (640). Just so, especially in a political enterprise, especially an enterprise of political reform, and most especially in the most radical enterprise of political reform, the founding of a new political community. In this highest politics, heroism, the finest spiritedness, combines with prudence or practical wisdom to form the statesman-founder or the preserver of some good founding. Coverdale finds such wisdom, but only retrospectively. Although attracted, he could not, “under any circumstances, have fallen in love with Zenobia” (672), as a real man might have done; he reads the George Sand romances she gives him without discernible effect. He dislikes his own sex (men are such brutes, he muses [695]); he contends that the best aspect of a man’s soul is seen when womanly caring shines through (667); he says that he wishes he could be ruled by women instead of men. But the two sisters he cares for at Blithedale love the blow-hard but at least superficially manly Hollingsworth, armed with the “necromancy” of rhetoric (741)—when they are not in the thrall of that other magician, Westervelt. Coverdale lacks even the modest degree of manliness that would attract a woman sufficiently to want to rule him. He can neither rule nor be ruled, and so lacks both characteristics of the Aristotelian citizen.

Covering himself, he quite literally observes others from all angles; from below, when listening to Hollingsworth’s harangues delivered atop a large rock; from above, when in an apartment in town, looking into the windows across the street, or in a leafy bower in the woods at Blithedale. He acts effectively only in slavish work, never in political rule. Coverdale has one strength, born of passivity; he can resist the machinations of stronger men. He instantly spots Westervelt as an evil mountebank, and sees through Hollingsworth, too, not so quickly. In the book’s central chapter, “A Crisis,” he resists Hollingsworth’s offer of subordinate partnership in the criminal-reformatory scheme. He is just strong enough to say no, if never strong enough to say yes. Zenobia, so very wrong so often and even wicked in one thing, foretells Coverdale’s fate in her story of a young man, Theodore (literally and ironically, ‘Gift-from-God’), offered the choice of loving the Veiled Lady without seeing her unveiled or unveiling her first but forbidden from having her and longing forever for her face. Coverdale can resist evil, but lacks the manliness to love erotically or Christianly/agapically, which is always, in this world, to love sight-unseen (776-777). Zenobia (‘Gift-from-Zeus’) does see into the covered heart of Mr. Gift-from-God, and judges him not to be God’s gift to women.

Coverdale’s refusal does precipitate a crisis. If Hollingsworth can have no male followers (however minimally manly), only women, he has only one half of what he needs as a founder. His enterprise because no other men will join it, not even weak ones. If the romance ended here, the romancer would have a novella satirizing modern reformers. But Hawthorne will dig deeper.

 

Return to the City

In the central set of chapters Coverdale recounts his time back in the city, after his break with Hollingsworth leaves his bonds with the sisters weakened. Before leaving Blithedale, he visits the communal pigsty, “to take leave of the swine!” (757). In Plato’s Republic, one of Socrates’ young interlocutors pushes his partners to new philosophic heights by dismissing Socrates’ first formulation of the just city as a mere city of pigs, a place where only the most ordinary needs of the body are to be satisfied, while the boldest, most spirited eroticism will starve. Blithedale’s real city of pigs is populated by “greasy citizens” who are “almost stifled and buried alive, in their corporeal substance.” “Peeping at me, an instant, out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes”—no visionary madness, here—”they dropt asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was still present to them, betwixt dream and reality” (757-758). In the preface Hawthorne had called Brook Farm itself both daydream and fact, fiction and reality. For Hawthorne as for Plato, the best practical utopians are pigs, who suffer none of the heart-burnings of people.

Going to the countryside means returning to nature, and Hawthorne uses the four natural elements (fire, water, earth, and air) as images throughout. Coverdale returns to the city but discovers for the first time that nature is there, too: sky, rain, fruit trees, grapevines, wind, birds, and a solitary predatory cat. And a human family, the only unbroken one in the novel. The city is natural for human beings; romanticism is mistaken in its naturalism. “‘I bless God for these good folks,’ thought I to myself—’I have not seen a prettier piece of nature, in all my summer in the country…. I will pay them a little more attention, by-and-by'” (764). If he ever does, he doesn’t tell us; that doesn’t prevent us from remembering them. He next sees a dove in a rainstorm, yet does not think of the Covenant, and its promise of a world that will never be destroyed again, by God or man.

Against the persistent strength of nature, human beings in this group of chapters set their art. The first of these artists is the wealthy Zenobia, whom Coverdale spies in her apartment with Priscilla and Westervelt. In town, Zenobia dresses according to her status, transforming herself “into a work of art” (775). Offended by her cold treatment, Coverdale induces her to blush and then to pale by mentioning Hollingsworth, who, he remarks, likely prefers the more pliant of the sisters. Zenobia sees this, too, and attempts to rid herself of her rival by shunting her back to Westervelt, who puts her on exhibit again as the Veiled Lady. Here socialism, scientism, and charlatanry converge explicitly. Westervelt speaks to his audience of marks about “a new era that was dawning upon the world; a near 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” (806). In this New Age of what Coverdale calls with deliberate paradox “mystical sensuality,” men believe that not only nature but human nature, the human soul, are infinitely malleable (804), stuff for the scientistic and synthetic forging of a new Heaven and a new Earth. This is the utopianism of the evil ‘Why not?’ Coverdale witnesses the mesmeric exploitation of Priscilla for a second time, but does nothing; it is Hollingsworth, who has actively pursued her back to town, who has the strength to call out to her and break the spell. More precisely, the hypnosis fails less by virtue of Hollingsworth’s own strength of character (he is really only reclaiming a lost disciple) as by virtue of the strength of Priscilla’s agapic love for him. The real enchantment of selfless love defeats false enchantment in this true, that is, anti-Romantic, romance.

Zenobia’s betrayal of her sister and Westervelt’s pseudo-mystical, scientistic spell would never have occurred had it not been for the failure of Old Moodie as husband and father. His prideful confession is central to this central, city-centered chapter group. Coverdale finds him in a saloon, after noticing that the same wine that brings joy elsewhere in the world brings a sort of death-in-life drunkenness to the commercial-republican descendants of Puritan New England. Still, as in Plato’s Laws, nature finally exerts its power over regime differences, dissolving some conventional restraints. Wine gets old men talking here, as it did in ancient Greece. Moodie tells his story, the story of a rich man named Fauntleroy (‘Boy-King’) who, basking in the “unnatural light” of his gold and wanting to stay rich, committed a crime, was discovered, and fled; unable to take his punishment like a man, he left his noble wife to die and his beautiful daughter “worse than orphaned” (791-792). With “no adequate control” from any parent, “her character was left to shape itself,” its passions leading the way to the rule of Westervelt. Moodie saw her years later, feeling not shame but pride at “the brilliant child of my prosperity” (800). “In Zenobia, I live again!” (799), his vanity renewed. Soon forgotten—”being a mere image, an optical delusion, crated by the sunshine of prosperity” (792), he had by then remarried, choosing this time a poor seamstress, who bore him another daughter before dying. Like the Emperor Gallienus, the moody old ex-king invites rebellion. Old Moodie is a sort of King Midas, his “fatality” determined by his love of gold, “being to behold whatever he touched dissolve” (793). [9]  And through Moodie Westervelt also came to rule Priscilla. Moodie had caused Priscilla to be brought to Blithedale in order to bring her under Zenobia’s protection (had he, like his elder daughter, finally come to be disenchanted by the charlatan?), hoping that Zenobia would treat her as a sister. But he had long ago destroyed the natural foundations of any sisterly feelings, which would depend upon a shared childhood. What the family could not supply, the watery communitarianism of Blithedale could not begin to replace. Just the opposite: The two sisters became rivals in love, the more powerful betraying the weaker by returning her to a man she knew might destroy Priscilla’s soul.

 

Justice Without Communitarianism

The third group of chapters returns Coverdale to Blithedale, where Hollingsworth, Priscilla, and Zenobia have also come, after the defeat of Westervelt. Coverdale quickly learns that defeating Satan once does not defeat him once and for all, or even for long. The Blithedalers enjoy a masquerade: Dressed in costumes that mix antiquity (the goddess Diana, Arcadian shepherd) with early America (Puritans, shakers, Indians, a witch), and modern America (“a negro of the Jim Crow order,” a Kentucky woodsman), they dance to a fiddler dressed as the Devil (814-815). New-Age Blithedale contains human types that span the history of the West, and so is not entirely new. [10]  All in play—but all linking the Blithedale project imagistically with the more sinister devil and play-actor, Westervelt. Earlier, Westervelt had only lurked on the edges of Blithedale; now, his symbolic equivalent plays the tune to which the communitarians dance. They laugh at each other’s costumes, and Coverdale—concealed and watching, as usual—betrays his presence by laughing, too. The Blithedalers merrily chase him. Escaping, he stumbles over mossed-over logs left by some previous owner, decades before. After tripping over these hard facts produced by nature and a hard-working man, Coverdale wanders off to find his three erstwhile friends, engaged in a real showdown.

Utopians seek justice. In real communities, justice is the aim of the courts. With characteristic drama, Zenobia announces, “I have been on trial for my life,” and Hollingsworth does look the part of the Puritan judge trying a witch, with Priscilla “the pale victim” of witchcraft. Costumed as the Oriental princess for whom she named herself, Zenobia appears “dethroned” (818-819). Appealing her case to a higher authority, God, she counter-accuses Hollingsworth of selfish manipulation. They are right about each other, and God will indeed judge them both. Hollingsworth leaves with Priscilla, who is rejected by her sister in the end because Zenobia cannot humble herself to ask forgiveness for injury. In any event, Priscilla loves Hollingsworth more, needing him and owing him more, and better able to give him what he will need after he gets what he deserves. She is the real human judge, the only one animated by Christian love, and she renders the right decision.

For her part, Zenobia draws a moral—the wrong one. Men always triumph over women on “the battlefield of life” because a woman’s breast has no breastplate, and “the whole universe” makes “common cause against the woman who swerves one hair’s-breath, out of the beaten path”; in so swerving, the woman herself “goes all astray and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards” (827). In her Epicurean ambition to swerve like one of the philosopher’s atoms, Zenobia succeeds only in confusing herself. Her feminist/reformist self-pity illustrates the truth Zenobia mixes with it. She then denies that Priscilla will be a better wife for Hollingsworth than she could have been; judging by appearances (as she had done in her liaison with the handsome Westervelt, and as an attractive person is especially likely to do), she mistakenly claims that Priscilla is too weak to sustain the marriage. She leaves Coverdale with a final lie. “Sick to death with playing at philanthropy and progress” in “a foolish dream,” she will convert to Catholicism and go “behind the black veil” (830)—in imitative opposition to Priscilla and the silvery veil she wore in the mesmerism shows. In reality, Zenobia has chosen the black veil of suicide; she walks into the water, quenching the fire of her spirit, to the end playing the tragic heroine of a romance novel, a romance Hawthorne undercuts by describing the grisly scene of the recovery of her corpse. [11]  In death she defeats Westervelt—at the funeral he laments, “she is beyond my reach”—and Hollinsworth, who will spend the remainder of his life overcome by guilt for his crime—he, who had intended to reform criminals. But in so triumphing she destroys herself. Only Priscilla really triumphs, now the “guardian” of her broken beloved, whose presence nonetheless protects her in the society of her day better than Zenobia could have done. When Coverdale next sees the couple, Priscilla shows “a veiled happiness in her fair and quiet countenance” (843-844)—veiled, because she cares for an emotional invalid, but true, because agapic love is true. Nature also wins: “While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and directed all eyes upon that radiant presence, as her fairest handiwork. Zenobia perished. Will not Nature shed a tear? Ah, no! She adopts the calamity at once into her system,” growing grass on the beauty’s grave (845). Nature’s water quenched nature’s fire. The airy, still small voice of the one unselfish human soul in the story and the powerful, silent workings of nature quietly and justly prevail over earthly play-acting and self-importance.

 

Coverdale Uncovered

“I—I myself—was in love—with—PRISCILLA!” (585). Coverdale’s confession, his unmasking of his own nature, constitutes the book’s last words and confirms Zenobia’s parable about the need to love unselfishly and sight-unseen. Coverdale can perform neither of the principle duties of a citizen: He cannot form a family; he cannot summon the energy to fight in a good cause. [12]  He has the strength to tell a story truly, and no more. Some scholars have called him an unreliable narrator, but he is actually quite reliable at that. It is as a man and a citizen that he cannot be relied upon.

Hawthorne writes no ‘postface’ to balance his preface. He leaves that to his readers. In a way, he also leaves some notes toward one, consisting of his other contemporaneous writings and citizen activities. Some decades ago, American literary scholars debated whether books like The Blithedale Romance ought to be read in their ‘historical context’ or as works with an integrity of their own, apart from the circumstances in which they were written. Both sides were right. To understand the pith of The Blithedale Romance, one needs know little more of Brook Farm and of America than Hawthorne says in the preface, which isn’t much. Utopianism is perennial, and so is a just critique of utopianism. This notwithstanding, it amplifies the understanding of any work of art to look beyond it, to consider the possible political purposes of its author in practice as well as ‘in theory.’ Would it not be good to see if a book that commends prudence as a moral and political good actually tended to serve the ends intended?

Hawthorne’s lifetime coincided with the ever-sharpening factionalism which lead to civil war. [13]  The compromises that had helped to hold the Union together for decades began to unravel as the Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the issue of slavery in the American West. The Democratic Party tried to close regional divisions within itself and within the country at large by nominating Hawthorne’s college friend, Franklin Pierce, for the presidency. A New Hampshireman, Pierce exemplified the political ‘Doughface’—the Northern man with Southern principles who opposed abolitionism as destructive of the American constitutional union. A loyal Democrat, Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of Pierce. Whigs jibed, Hawthorne has given us another romance, and in a way he had. But he intended his Life of Franklin Pierce to complement Blithedale as a cognate act of prudence. [14]

A “man of the people, but whose natural qualities inevitably made him a leader among them,” Pierce had learned patriotism from his father and religion from his mother (83). His father had opposed the “questionable, if not treasonable” disunionism of the High Federalists during the Madison Administration. As a boy, Pierce had listened to his father talking politics with “homely, native eloquence” (84). At Bowdoin College Pierce joined “the progressive or democratic” rather than the “respectable conservative” student party (87). In political life ever since he has remained a firm Jacksonian, detesting governmental centralization as much as disunion. Thus he had never “shun[ned] the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality—his whole, united, native country—better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory,” namely, abolitionism (105). Pierce saw that anti-slavery agitation would tear “to pieces the Constitution”; “the evil would be certain, while the good was, at best, a contingency” (163). More likely, abolition of slavery would result in “the ruin of two races which now dwelt in greater peace and affection, it is not too much to say, than ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf” (164). “The theorist may take that view [abolitionism] in his closet; the philanthropist by profession may strive to act upon it uncompromisingly, amid the tumult and warfare of his life. But the statesman of practical sagacity—who loves his country as it is, and evolves good from things as they exist, and who demands to feel his firm grasp upon a better reality before he quits the one already gained—will be likely here, with all the greatest statesmen of America, to stand in the attitude of a conservative.” (163) Slavery is an evil, but it is “one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivance, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream” (166).

“[G]reat moral reform” occurs not by dint of human will and intellect,” and even when human “progress” effects such reform, it leaves some other “evil or wrong on the path behind it” (166). All of this mixes prudence and romance in much the same proportions as Blithedale does; unfortunately, unlike even a prudent romance, political analysis must do more than illustrate moral truths, although it ought not ignore them. The complacent portrait of amicable master-slave relations and the prophesied ease with which the evil of slavery would dissolve are probably intended as artful romantic tranquilizers for overwrought reformers, but they are utopian-all-too-utopian.

In falsifying these romantic claims, the Civil War shook Hawthorne. Ten years after the publication of Blithedale and the Life, he published one of his last essays, “Chiefly About War Matters,” published in 1862 [15]. He masked himself with the pen name, “A Peaceable Man” and decried the likelihood that domestic politics would be populated by military heroes for the next half-century (one bullet-headed president will succeed another in the Presidential chair”) (367). True to his unionism, he condemned secession as treason.

He rightly predicted that “whoever may be benefitted by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes… who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms” (387). He condemns John Brown (“Nobody was ever more justly hanged”) because such utter lack of prudence alone deserves the most severe requital (397-398), while admitting that “my Yankee heart stirred triumphantly” when he saw the conversion of the fortress Brown had stormed into a prison for rebels (398). The prisoners themselves are men of a type unknown to Northerners; having lived in isolation and illiteracy under the rule of plantation grandees, these peasants had not “the remotest comprehension of what they had been fighting for” (400).

The weakest section of the essay unfortunately forms its centerpiece: Hawthorne’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The “essential representative of all the Yankees” is ungainly, kind, naturally if not conventionally dignified, and yes, honest (374-379). Of the stated purpose of Lincoln—to defend the Union in war in order to preserve the Constitution in defense of the natural rights of enunciated in the Declaration of Independence—Hawthorne betrays not the slightest comprehension. He awards more unmixed praise to General George McClellan, the Democratic Party general who would run against Lincoln two years later. By then Hawthorne would be dead, and with him much of the generation that had attempted to invent ways of preserving the Union in peace, mixing realism and self-deception.

If, finally, Hawthorne lacked both the firmness in defense of principle and the practical wisdom of Lincoln, if his prudential critique of utopianism lacks an adequate philosophic dimension to go with its attractive and understated Christianity, that reservation suggests that he was no Shakespeare. ‘Being no Shakespeare’ is a widely-held deficiency among writers, hard to hold against one. ‘Being no Lincoln’ as a political man is also no rarity. The Blithedale Romance remains a fine American antidote to the utopianism some Americans fall into when their patience with their country finally runs out.

 

Notes

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Blithedale Romance. In Millicent Bell, ed.: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels (New York: The Library of America, 1983). All subsequent citations in text. For the best textual exegesis of the novel, one that is especially alert to Hawthorne’s use of symbolism, see Hyatt H. Waggoner: Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
2. “[T]he humorous sketch of his companions in the custom house”—which Hawthorne published some time before writing the Blithedale Romance—”had called down upon Hawthorne’s head a storm of vilification. Consequently… he wanted to take every precaution to make clear that he was not copying actual people.” See F. O. Matthiessen: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1941], 266).
3. See for example A. N. Kaul: “The Blithedale Romance,” in A. N. Kaul, ed.: Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966, 155. Founded by a Unitarian minister, Brook Farm aspired to a sort of secularized or at least non-sectarian community, imitating the structure of the highly sectarian and entirely unsecular communitarian aspirations of the American Puritans. See also George Parsons Lathrop: A Study of Hawthorne (New York: AMS Press, 1969 [1876], 181-190) and Hubert H. Hoeltje: Inward City: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Durham: Duke University Press, 1962).
4. “We had very young people among us, it is true,—downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above one’s knee [i.e., no infants at all], but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply” (685-686). Few families ventured upon the utopian project.
5. Some critics have complained that Hawthorne’s portrait of the commune fails because it centers on four characters only. But that is Hawthorne’s point: Human beings naturally settle into cliques of families and friends. Founders of stable political communities recognize that and build upon it. Mis-founded communities, including utopias, do not, and fail.
6. Zenobia was one of several provincial rulers who rebelled during the irregular reign of the Emperor Gellienus in the third century A. D. Mild and indolent, with outbursts of cruelty, Gellienus failed adequately to defend the Empire—something of a parallel, as it happens, to the father of Hawthorne’s Zenobia, as will transpire. Zenobia, “queen of Palmyra and the East,” claimed Cleopatra as an ancestor, equaling her in beauty and surpassing her in chastity and valor (Gibbon: Decline and Fall, I.xi). A woman of “superior genius [who] broke through the servile indolence impoed on her sex by the climate and manners of Asia (I.xi) (its political life proverbial in the West for its luxury, ‘effeminacy,’ and consequent susceptibility to despotism), the heroic Zenobia’s “manly understanding,” her “incomparable prudence and fortitude,” refined by her considerable learning, entitled her to rule. It did not entitle her to rebel, in the estimation of the Romans, and the Emperor Aurelian crushed her army, captured her, fettered her with gold, and exhibited her in a triumph at Rome. In the end, her courage faltered and she “ignominiously purchased life by the sacrifice of her fame and her friends,” blaming her rebellion on her political allies (I.xi). Ancient Palmyra was a place of commerce and arts; its queen’s luxury, spiritedness, treachery, and enslavement in gilded chains prefigures the character and history of her fictional American counterpart.
7. ‘Zenobia’ means ‘gift of Zeus,’ and Pandora was indeed Zeus’ ‘gift’ to human beings. The story of that unpleasant gift forms part of a story of the gods themselves, which for the Greeks was a story of failed fatherhood. The first gods are the offspring of Father Heaven and Mother Earth. Father Heaven hates his own offspring, confining them; in revenge his son Chronos castrates him. Zeus is a new god, an Olympian, who defeats his father Chronos and ends the times when fellowship existed between the gods and men. Zeus founds an oligarchy if not a tyranny in the cosmos. In order to subordinate men, Zeus hid labor-saving fire from them, because leisure provides men with the opportunity to think and thus to rule or challenge the rule of the gods. In the familiar myth, Prometheus—a brother of Chronos and therefore an enemy of the Olympians—steals fire and gives it to men; Zeus retaliates not by injuring Prometheus, whom he did not fear, but men, bidding the blacksmith-god Hephaestus and other Olympians to create the beautiful Pandora, like Hawthorne’s Zenobia a master of rhetoric with a taste for finery in clothing. ‘Pandora’ means ‘all-gifted,’ the one who has been given everything; she in turn will give not good but evils (Hesiod: Works and Days, ll. 42-105). Pandora is the first woman, the Eve of Greek myth, a bringer of evil to men, that is, to males, tormenting them if they marry and leaving them without support of family if they refuse to marry (Hesiod: Theogeny, ll. 585-612). The parallels to Hawthorne’s Zenobia and her two ‘countries,’ Blithedale and America, are clear: the father who gives wealth to the daughter but inculcates no good habits in her, the founding and refounding of political communities that repeat the tensions between fathers and children down through the generations. There is one twist to the Greek myth: Hawthorne has the father, Old Moodie, deliver not Pandora but his other daughter, Priscilla, to Blithedale. In a sense Priscilla  opens a box of evils, leading to the effective destruction of the community, but it is the evil in Zenobia she ‘opens.’ Hawthorne would never simply blame any being or force external to men for evil, knowing that men supply their own evils out of their not-so-blithe hearts.
8. Hawthorne set down a solid foundation stone for his own marriage in writing to his fiancée on the new ‘spiritualism’: “The view which I take of the matter is caused by no want of faith in mysteries, but from a deep reverence of the soul…. Keep the imagination sane.” (Cited in Matthiessen, op. cit., 205). Keeping the imagination sane is the purpose of Hawthornian romance. In a more directly political way, Hawthorne also wrote, in 1844, that the American Revolution “did not, like that of France, go so deep as to disturb the common sense of the country.” (“A Book of Autographs,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Miscellanies: Biographical and Other Sketches and Letters [Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900, 344]).
9. Kaul says that Old Moodie’s story “might be called The Parable of the American,” a riches-to-rags saga of a man who lives in the two American nations of rich and poor (Kaul, op. cit., 59). If anything, this is a reverse parable, a reverse Horatio Alger plot designed before the invention of Horatio Alger, just as Hawthorne’s Blithedale is a refutation of Marxist utopianism before Marx. Neither capitalism nor socialism wins Hawthorne’s wholehearted allegiance.
10. In Matthiessen’s words, “Unlike virtually all the other spokesmen of the day, [Hawthorne] could never feel that America was a new world…. Even at Brook Farm, he  had not been able to share in the declaration that the new age was the dawn of untried possibilities” (op. cit., 322).
11. A real Catholic, Orestes Brownson, wrote in a contemporary review that Hawthorne erred in having Zenobia commit suicide: “Women of her large experience and   free principles never kill themselves for disappointed affection” (Review, Brownson’s Literary Quarterly, October 1852; quoted in J. Donald Crowley, ed.: Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970, 266). Here Brownson is too much the realist, ignoring the genre Hawthorne has chosen.   Zenobia must die, because in romances justice must triumph.
12. “Were there any cause, in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man’s dying for, and which my death would benefit, then—provided, however, the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble—methinks I might be bold to offer up my life” (847).
13. The best account of Hawthorne’s politics is Lawrence Sargent Hall: Hawthorne: Critic of Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). Hall skillfully links Hawthorne’s writings with his political activities, including his tenure in the American consulate in London during the Pierce Administration.
14. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Life of Franklin Pierce, in Miscellanies: Biographical and Other Sketches and Letters (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900). All citations in text. On the Whiggish jibe, see Matthiessen op. cit., 316-317.
15. Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Chiefly About War Matters,” in Miscellanies, op. cit.  All citations in text.