Abstract
This chapter on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance traces how the novel toys with, and undermines, naïve notions of American grounds as utopian space. It contributes to a historical understanding of the utopian psychology in the United States by demonstrating how Hawthorne creates a historical narrative of failed utopian practices in the United States and describes an additional crisis of utopianism caused by the growing and aggressive market economy. It asks a pessimistic question that all subsequent utopianists that draw on the national/utopian narrative will have to contend with: since all of your utopian ancestors failed, why would you succeed? This is especially pertinent as Hawthorne writes after utopian socialism had been quite prominent and popular in the United States for decades. Ultimately, the narrator relishes the absence of any utopian potential because it absolves him from all obligations to try his hand at utopianism. Instead, the utopian past serves him well as the space for historical romances.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I am using the term socialism loosely here, referring to a variety of ideas to distribute labor and capital more evenly within a community.
- 3.
Commonly referred to as Anti-Dühring, this is a longer version of the more commonly known Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft/Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1870).
- 4.
There is, as far as I can tell, little research on Paul Brown, although his critical Twelve Months in New Harmony (1827) is an important source on the community. Eventually, he left the community because it did not live up to its egalitarian promises. He authored multiple radical works (see Bestor 1950, 187; Oved 1987, 120–121).
- 5.
Critics agree that Zenobia is loosely modelled on Margarete Fuller (Millington 2011b). Fuller is also the only historical person associated with Brook Farm that The Blithedale Romance mentions by name: Coverdale informs Priscilla that she resembles Fuller. This is of course another Hawthornian jape, as Priscilla is Zenobia’s sister.
- 6.
Possibly, this review was authored by the English writer George Eliot (1819–1880) (see footnote in Millington 2011b, 264).
- 7.
Of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne could not have read William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation (ca. 1650) in its entirety, as the original text was only rediscovered in 1855. However, before the manuscript was lost sometime around the American Revolution, multiple historians used it as a source, making it a touchstone of early American history.
- 8.
Here of course alluding to Philip J. Deloria’s famous publication Playing Indian (1998), in which he outlines European American strategies to claim ‘nativity’ to the land via such masquerades.
- 9.
A similar spatial entanglement can be observed, for example, in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). The short story starts out implying that the Puritan settlement is the place of ‘Faith’ and civilization, and the woods the place where witches and the devil rule. In the course of the story, this binary is complicated until the witch-infested woods are the place that reflects and reveals the truth about the settlement (Achilles 2012).
- 10.
Arguably, The Blithedale Romance is the most widely read of all the works discussed here. Another canonical writer of the nineteenth century has also written a romance/satire of sorts about her time at a utopian community: Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter From An Unwritten Romance (1873) is likewise vaguely based on an autobiographical experience, namely her living with her family in Fruitlands (1843), an intentional community that her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, had founded. There are many points of contact that confirm the influence of Hawthorne on Alcott, and thus the two works are often compared and contrasted by critics (cf. Cheney 1898; Fluck 2009; Michael 2016). Fruitlands and Brook Farm were part of the same communal wave, and the Hawthornes frequented Alcott’s childhood home. Her personal records confirm that she read Hawthorne’s works. Oats describes the problems intentional communities are likely to undergo when expertise and dedication to physical labor are lacking in most members. The main plot portrays the hard work of the mother of the family, and the development of the paternal figure, who goes from utopian dreaming to thinking practically for his immediate, nuclear family. The utopian community in Oats serves as a liminal space in which he undergoes a personal transformation. Thus, his utopian practice is not moving toward realizing a utopia but turns him into a father-figure. Just as the father refocuses himself from the universal brotherhood to the family, so does Alcott embed the utopian endeavor as if it were part of a larger romance that is concerned with the private matters of a family. While the rest of the romance remains, as the title suggests, ‘unwritten,’ the utopian section of it is completed. In this interplay of utopianism and romance, Alcott faintly echoes Hawthorne’s approach.
- 11.
In an 1855 letter to his publisher, Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously called the female authors who dominated him in the literary market “a damned mob of scribbling women” (e.g., in Dana 1910, 75).
- 12.
This is another parallel between reformer and romance writer that Nathaniel Hawthorne included: Like Robert Owen (Pitzer 1997, 98–99), Coverdale envisions death to lose its terror in utopia: “By our sweet, calm way of dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones, the final scene shall lose its terrors; so that, hereafter, it may be happiness to live, and bliss to die … the event shall not be sorrowful, but affect us with a tender, delicious, only half-melancholy, and almost smiling pathos” (155).
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Adamik, V. (2020). ‘Between Fiction and Reality’: The Utopian Past in The Blithedale Romance (1852). In: In Search of the Utopian States of America. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_4
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