No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
"Veiling Ladies and Narrative Masquerade in The Blithedale Romance
Abstract
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
Ticknor and Fields advertised The Blithedale Romance as a glimpse into Hawthorne’s six-month participation in George Ripley’s Brook Farm experiment. While Brook Farm had been largely forgotten by 1852, the novel’s appeal lay in its connection to its author, a sudden celebrity in the wake of The Scarlet Letter’s commercial success in 1850. As his novels attracted a growing fanbase, readers sought out Blithedale for the purpose of learning about Hawthorne’s past. Ticknor and Fields’s marketing efforts had expanded their print sphere beyond the immediate locality to address a national audience, thrusting fame and recognition on authors to a degree that could not have been previously imagined. Vexed that American readers had not critically examined the ramifications of this expanding print sphere, Hawthorne composes Blithedale to correct the equation of a fictional narrator with a novel’s author, a product of the evolving culture of literary celebrity. Insisting his text be classified as a romance, Hawthorne subverts any recognizable feature of the genre to elicit feelings of disorientation, frustration, and disappointment in readers expecting to access the author’s biographical feelings and impressions of the defunct transcendentalist commune. By situating his romance within a chapter from his own life and then failing to provide any insight as to his biographical experience, Hawthorne invites the reader to consider the changing dynamics of the relationship between author and audience.
In this edited collection commemorating the bicentennial of Hawthorne’s birth in 1804, Millicent Bell gathers essays by distinguished scholars and critics that examine the ways in which Hawthorne related himself to the "real" in his own world and expressed that relation in his writing. Radically revising the older view that he was detached from conditions of actual life in 19th-century American society, the authors undertake to show how current social conditions, current events, and political movements taking place at a crucial point in American history were an evident part of Hawthorne’s consciousness. The essays situate his imaginative writings in a contemporary context of common experience and rediscover a Hawthorne alert to pressing problems of his day, especially slavery, feminism, and reform in general-the very issues that motivated his contemporaries on the eve of the Civil War. Hawthorne was, with his own complicity, long described as a writer of unreal romances (as he preferred to call his novels) or "allegories of the heart" as he termed some of his short stories. But the literary mode of his fiction has long needed to be redefined. The essays in this collection contribute to the turn in recent Hawthorne criticism which shows how deeply implicated in realism his writing was. This volume should long continue to provide new starting points for changing views of a great writer. Contributors: Millicent Bell, Nina Baym, Michael T. Gilmore, Leland S. Person, David Leverenz, Larry J. Reynolds, Lawrence Buell, Rita K. Gollin, John Carlos Row, Brenda Wineapple.
So far this millennium, E. Shaskan Bumas has published essays in Early American Literature, American Literature, Minnesota Review, Turnrow, and the RBS Gazette.
I would like to acknowledge the Office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs of New Jersey City University (Dr. Larry Carter and Jo Bruno) and the SBR Committee of 2002-2003 for an internal grant that allowed me to finish this article by reducing my course load for that academic year to 4/3.
1. In Todorov's understanding, Morton would probably be (rather like Bartolomé de las Casas) one who does not accept the significance of the Indians' difference.
2. In the metafictional conceit introductory to the three Tales of the Province-house (Originally called Legends of the Province House), the narrator goes to the Province House (built 1679) which in the present day, the mid-nineteenth century, has turned into an inn where an old, almost historical man, tells him the local gossip and legends, that the narrator turns into, as Hawthorne referred to them in letters to his publishers, "articles." "Howe's Masquerade" is one of those Legends or Tales. The narrator improves on the old man's legend, as Miles Coverdale will claim to do with the chapter, "Zenobia's Legend." First the usual carnival guests arrive, including figures from history and literature:
The brilliant lighted apartments were thronged with figures that seemed to have stepped from the dark canvass of historic portraits, or to have flitted forth from the magic pages of romance, or at least to have flown hither from one of the London theatres, without a change of garments. Steeled knights of the Conquest, bearded statesmen of Queen Elizabeth, and high-ruffed ladies of her court, were mingled with characters of comedy, such as a parti-colored Merry Andrew, gingling his cap and bells; a Falstaffe, almost as provocative of laughter as his prototype; and a Don Quixote, with a bean-pole for a lance, and a pot-lid for a shield.
3. Further: "On the shoulders of a comely youth, uprose the head and branching antlers of a stag; a second . . . a wolf . . . a real bear . . . ready for the dance. . . . His inferior nature rose half-way, to meet his companions as they stooped" (55-56).
4. The phrase "Indian summer," which evokes the idea that time is not so relentless, comes, according to Brewer's Dictionary of Prose and Fable, from the mild, dry, and hazy weather of late autumn when settlers in the Eastern colonies expected attack from the Western Indian-held territories. For a metaphoric use of the phrase, see W. D. Howells's Indian Summer (1885-86), about a mid-life thawing of the heart of a journalist bachelor who might have turned out as cold as Miles Coverdale. That book, like Hawthorne's Marble Faun, has its dénouement at an Italian carnival.
5. Hollinger points out that Miles Coverdale and Priscilla repeat the Christian names of a famous seventeenth-century couple. Miles Standish's love for Priscilla Mullins was unrequited; she married his friend. Hollinger does not mention that Miles Standish led the attack on Merry Mount and was therefore partially responsible for the destruction of an idyllic community in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, nor does Hawthorne in his "May-pole of Merry Mount."
6. The different contexts in which the word knot is used throughout The Blithedale Romance...
The innocent, fair May Welland and the experienced, dark Ellen Olenska appear to be direct opposites of each other, representing the familiar virgin/whore binary. This essay examines Wharton's text as it consistently questions this binary through formal and thematic interrogations of various distinctions. In addition to the opposition between May and Ellen, there is the problematic distinction between narrator and character, which the novel's use of free indirect discourse brings to the fore. Further, the text uses multiple figures of masking or “trying on” of disguises, questioning the distinction between masks and the people who wear those masks and between the actual and the mimetic. The thematic oscillation between woman as traditionally conforming, innocent virgin on the one hand and threatening, corrupting temptress on the other takes place on the formal level as the narration calls into question the reality of any meaningful distinction between apparently oppositional binaries.
Women, Death and Theatricality in The Blithedale Romance - Volume 26 Issue 1 - Ffrangcon Lewis
The Blithedale Romance: A Radical Reading
- Nina Baym
Margaret Fuller as Hawthorne's Zenobia: The Problem of Moral Accountability in Fictional Biography
- Louise D Cary
Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. Berkeley: U of California P
- A Napier
- David
Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P
- Samuel Coale
- Chase
Introduction.” The Blithedale Romance
- Annette Kolodny
Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender
- Efrat Tseëlon
Angel of the House, Ghost of the Commune: Zenobia as Sentimental Woman in The Blithedale Romance
- Elizabeth Dill
The Dark Lady of Salem
- Philip Rahv
The Masque of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life
- Efrat Tseëlon