SOURCE: “Substance and Reality in Hawthorne's Meta-Utopia,” in Utopian Studies, Vol. 1, 1987, pp. 173-87.

[In the following essay, Jacobs investigates the utopian elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.]

“Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning—or, at least, thought I had.”

Hawthorne to Fields, 1854

The unusual mix of autobiographical/historical subject matter and allegorical method in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance has led readers down a number of critical paths which seem insufficient, even in the views of critics themselves, to account for both matter and method in the book. The earliest readers, taking for granted that Brook Farm was the real subject of the work, approached it as a roman a clef, eagerly seeking portraits of Fuller, Channing, and Alcott¹ or an analysis of why the commune failed; the inherent interest of Blithedale's historical model has perpetuated this approach (Abel, Gordon). But the book's lack of specific detail has tended to frustrate attempts to use it as historical evidence, giving rise to such criticism as Elliott's that Hawthorne refuses “to confront the political and sociological issues posed by Brook Farm,” that he wants “the romance of Brook Farm without the commitment that evaluation would have entailed” (71-72). Other critics, interested in the general question of utopia, have taken their cue from Hawthorne's comments about social reform—particularly the well-known statement that his life at Brook Farm “was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one” (Letters 566)—and have read the book as an analysis of why utopian communities must fail, whether the cause be “the lingering pressures and effects of the repressive social organization [the community] has tried to escape” (Baym), the egotism of the reformer, the triumph of pride (Hoeltje), sexuality as embodied in Zenobia (Long), the competing claims of art and social conscience (Stoehr), or alienation and the evils of intellect (Beatty). A third group of readers have taken at face value Hawthorne's prefatory statement that his treatment of Brook Farm is “altogether incidental to the main purpose of the Romance” (1) and have largely disregarded the utopian subject-matter, producing a wide range of allegorical, archetypal, and psychological interpretations which claim that the book is actually unified around such varied concerns as the “Triumph of Mutability over Nature” (Jones), the status of women in Hawthorne's time (Matheson), or the “attempt to understand and give a meaningful shape to reality” (Stock). Taken as a whole, the readings of this novel well illustrate Hawthorne's own rather uninspired statement that “things may have a positive, a relative, and a composite meaning, according to the point of view” (American Notebooks 183).

Though many of these interpretations are elegant and plausible, it seems to me that we are mistaken either in side-stepping the utopian content of the novel or in attempting to read it as a negative evaluation of Brook Farm or of socialist communities in general. Of course, to assume that the book is about utopia merely because the setting is a utopian community would be as naive as to assume that The Marble Faun is simply a book about Italy. But the metaphors of this narrative constitute a broad analysis of the utopian impulse, an analysis much less critical of that impulse than is suggested by a literal reading of the characters' fates and the community's failure or by reference to Hawthorne's statements about Brook Farm and certain utopian reformers. At first thought, nothing could seem more antithetical to the utopian impulse, as generally defined, than Hawthorne's deep skepticism about the possibility of perfection in human life. But his prefatory statement disclaiming any intention of drawing conclusions about “socialism” provides inadequate basis for dismissing the utopian content of the book. For one thing, socialism is only one form of utopianism; Brook Farm was merely one manifestation of a human impulse that fuels capitalism and Calvinism as well as Fourierisme. For another, Hawthorne's prefaces are notoriously shifty in tone and intention, and this one is no different. The uproar that had greeted the portrayal of living persons in “The Custom House” and the use of a real family's name in The House of the Seven Gables would certainly have encouraged Hawthorne to downplay his story's basis in history. But at several points before and during the composition of the book, he referred to the Community as its subject, and its ties to that subject were clearly understood by his contemporaries as well as by the many commentators who have sought to identify the real-life models for Blithedale's characters. Hawthorne transformed his experiences in dramatic ways, particularly when transmogrifying that healthy and rather vulgar little Boston seamstress into the spiritualized Priscilla; but the parallels between the notebook entries and certain passages in the romance show that a great deal more of Brook Farm than its romantic ambiance informs his creation of Blithedale. It is thus dangerous to assume that the utopian materials are merely atmospheric.

Further, biographical materials provide insufficient basis for assuming that the book is anti-utopian. The famous “unnatural and unsuitable” passage is not so clearly condemnatory when read in context, for it goes on to the comical claim that Hawthorne's callouses and tan are illusions, and ends with the statement “Enough of nonsense.” It has been too rarely noted that this statement was written not after Hawthorne left Brook Farm permanently, but during a brief vacation, and that he in fact rejoined the community not long after. In a letter to David Mack on May 25, 1842, when no longer a member of Brook Farm, Hawthorne wrote, “I have much faith in the general good tendency of institutions on this principle, yet I am troubled with many doubts … whether I, as an individual, am a proper subject for these beneficial influences” (qtd. in Manning Hawthorne, 729-30). Though the more temperate sentiments expressed in this letter could be due to the fact that its intended reader was a member of the Northampton commune, the statement is worth considering along with the better-known passage, which, given its playful tone and its status as part of a love-letter, can hardly serve as the final word on Hawthorne's opinion of utopian communities, whatever his opinion of his own suitability to such a life. The lack of emphasis in the romance on the utopian community itself, its structure, rules, or theoretical basis, also makes the book singularly unsuccessful as an attempt to discredit such communities.

Neither roman a clef about a particular utopian scheme nor dystopia, the book is nevertheless about utopia, in a way more familiar in contemporary novels such as LeGuin's “ambiguous utopia” The Dispossessed or Lessing's The Marriages Between the Zones Three, Four, and Five. Such works might be called “meta-utopias,” for they serve not to propose or to condemn a particular utopian plan but rather to meditate upon utopia as a process, present in ordinary life as well as in utopian projects. We are all utopianists. In our life projects, in our choices of jobs, houses, lovers, we attempt to build that “good place” or “no place” in which we might be happy; and from time to time, at dinner with friends, in delight with a certain view or a certain piece of music, or in love with a mate, we find our world to be good. Some people, desiring to establish that place more permanently or to extend it to others, make blueprints for utopian communities that would formalize and fix the harmony intermittently experienced in ordinary life. Hawthorne's peculiar personal history and his habits of mind well qualify him to anatomize utopia in this broad sense of the word. One can easily see in his journals a psychological oscillation between sensuality and ideality which made him susceptible both to the idea of a private, sensual utopia—the Land of Cockaigne—which he bodied forth in Blithedale's Zenobia, and the idea of a communal utopia, represented by Priscilla. This oscillation between possession and desire, between love for the best of the existing world and love for what can be imagined, is a pattern bodied forth in the dialogic form of the classic utopias, in which selected elements of the material world may appear, in purified or intensified form, as elements of the imagined one.² In human consciousness, these two worlds are as intimately related as Blithedale's allegorical sisters, who spring from one source and suffer under the same tyrant. The communal project must always compete with personal projects for the psychic energy and commitment of its disciples. Though this ambivalence tends to diffuse an individual's involvement in utopian activity, Hawthorne shows the communal ideal as triumphing, even when the utopian project fails.

Priscilla is the only constant in this variable equation, the only one of the major characters who has no motivation, almost no psychology, and so may function purely as an allegorical personification. No vague abstraction of purity or spirituality, she has a very specific significance, established through “directive language” (Honig 113) that defines her as a personification of Blithedale in particular and utopian experiments in general. Her very name, that “quaint and prim cognomen” (29), calls up the utopian history of the Massachusetts colony, a history to which Coverdale directly refers when he imagines a “family of the old Pilgrims” (13) at the farm-hearth and describes the light from the farmhouse windows as the “beacon-fire which we have kindled for humankind” (25), in a clear echo of Winthrop's “City upon a Hill.” Blithedale, we are told, is to carry on the “high enterprise” of the Puritans. Both groups, Pilgrim and Puritan, were essentially utopian, seeking to bring their ideals into the realm of actuality, and in so doing, to extend the boundaries of that realm.³

Priscilla's generalized aspect announces her abstract function in the narrative: she is more like an idea than a person and has “hardly any physique” (34). In this romance, as in many of Hawthorne's tales, ideas are cold, colorless: the “cold, spectral monster” (55) that is Hollingsworth's philanthropic theory, the “cold, desolate, distrustful phantoms” that haunt the adventuresome mind (18), the “cold and lifeless tint” of Moodie's perceptions (84), and Coverdale's “cold tendency, between instinct and intellect” (154), to analyze other people's souls. So it is no coincidence that the Blithedalers gather in a snowstorm; that Priscilla, the embodiment of their idea, is fancied a Snow-Maiden; or that they face, on the morning after their arrival, a snow-covered landscape that looks like a “lifeless copy of the world in marble” (58). Like a marble statue, the mental landscape of the commune is, at this early stage, beautiful but dead, an idealized and immobile copy of the familiar world. But it is worth stressing that this phase will pass; both the community and its embodiment-spirit Priscilla gain life, warmth, and movement as the experiment progresses.

Like a mathematician posing a problem, an “allegorician” must define the terms of the equation: let x equal y²; let Priscilla equal Blithedale. Hawthorne signals this equivalence in a number of ways, the most important being his initial descriptions of both the woman and the community as “insubstantial.” To its members, the Blithedale environment is less substantial, though more natural, than the Boston life they have left; upon their arrival, they are uncomfortably aware of their precarious position in the surrounding world, which seems inarguably solid and real to the worldly mind. In the realm of infinite possibility that Blithedale represents, Priscilla's lack of substance is at first even more marked than it had been in the limited realm of ordinary life, as if the molecules of her being, released from the pressures of narrow circumstances, have dissipated into the increased space that has opened around her. Like the snow-storm that veils Blithedale as the members arrive, a “slight mist of uncertainty” floats around this veiled lady and keeps her from “taking a very decided place among creatures of flesh and blood” (49). Like the “gloomy, wild and vague” (37) solitude that surrounds the farmhouse, she is “unformed, vague and without substance” (72); her “thin substance might have been moulded out of air” (114). Likewise Blithedale seems “but an insubstantial sort of business” (43) to Coverdale on his sick-bed, and Hollingsworth describes the system on which it rests as a “wretched, unsubstantial scheme” (130): “I grasp it in my hand, and find no substance whatever. There is not human nature in it” (132). Blithedale is a world in which reality seems fluid, infinitely moldable; it gives the feeling that the earth is an “insubstantial bubble” in space (140). And part of its charm is that very fluidity, that sense of infinite possibilities, just as Priscilla's charm for Coverdale rests in the possibilities she offers to his imagination.

Priscilla's history, as it is gradually revealed, parallels the history of the utopian impulse. Priscilla is born in the poorest, dreariest section of the city. Many utopian thinkers have focused on urban problems and have proposed rural solutions: More's utopian city, for example, is anything but urban in its tranquil atmosphere, its abundance of trees and gardens, and its farm-based economy to which all citizens must contribute labor. Swift's dystopias of Lagado and Lilliput mock urban intrigue, urban pretensions—the failings that accompany hyper-civilization—and his noble Houyhynhyms live the country life. In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy's vision of hell is essentially an urban one: hundreds and thousands of brutalized, starving faces, those city throngs who are so much more difficult to sentimentalize than are barefoot peasant children or ragged shepherds. Though Blithedale precedes Bellamy, its blighted Boston is not so different from Bellamy's. Hawthorne too sees the city as a place both giving rise to and starving the utopian impulse. Into that corrupt urban world—specifically, into the decayed mansion of the colonial governor, the rotten shell of a once-noble system—Priscilla is born. The father of this “slim and unsubstantial girl” (26) is disappointed, middle-aged; similarly, most of the Blithedalers, the “parents” of the utopian project, are past their first youth and have suffered some disappointment. Priscilla lacks “human substance” (185) and gains strength only from the knowledge that somewhere in the world is a beautiful sister who will shelter her, just as a utopian project can gain strength only if it has some prospect of allying itself with the concrete reality which is its elder sister. Like any new endeavor, Priscilla is weak, and her paleness shows her “habitual seclusion from the sun and free atmosphere” (27): just so, the idea of utopia first grows in a hostile environment, in which it is mocked by ordinary people as Priscilla is mocked by her “gross and simple neighbors.” Priscilla's peculiar strength is found in her ability to see “distant places and splendid rooms” (187), places to which she has never travelled, and to foretell the future; similarly, the utopian spirit is essentially other-worldly, future-worldly, and its power often comes from the intensity with which those who are deprived of daily necessities and pleasures can vision forth an alternative state of existence. Like the utopian community, Priscilla is dressed in “poor but decent” (27) garb and has little regard for fashion. Her very trade associates her with reform movements, for the poor seamstress was a favorite subject of Victorian paintings showing the plight of the exploited worker.⁴ Priscilla's naivete parallels that aspect of utopianism which is unrealistically optimistic; she sees Blithedale as a “world where everybody is kind to me, and where I love everybody” (75) and believes that the “past never comes back again” (76). She is, of course, soon proved wrong, but this does not lessen the charm of her confidence. Dreamy and dream-like, she is a fit emblem of this “knot of dreamers” (14).

In the world outside the charmed region of the communal experiment, this fragile spirit had been ruled by the cynical entrepreneur Westervelt, whose tone is that of “worldly society at large … which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure, deforms the beautiful” (101); his brand of sneering cynicism still informs many observers' descriptions of real-life utopian endeavors.⁵ To the skeptic, the only value of the utopian dream is its profit-making potential, and Priscilla's gift is valuable only as a way to gull spectators who want to believe that time and space can be eradicated and the future seen. It is significant that Hawthorne nowhere, in the novel or in his letters, allies himself with this wholly cynical spirit; even in his most satiric epistles to Sophia, he mocks himself as much as his companions, and a strong note of affection, however exasperated at times, sounds through his accounts of Brook Farm, which take something of the same tone as Foster's playful threat to fix a horseshoe around Priscilla's neck. Similarly, the inhabitants of Blithedale find Priscilla's weaknesses endearing. She is generally inept, inefficient; she falters and falls; but these failings only evoke a kind of “playful pathos” (73) in the minds of her friends.

Like her history, her development parallels that of the community. Hollingsworth, in fact, explicitly ties Priscilla's fate to Blithedale's: “As we do by this friendless girl, so shall we prosper” (30). On the literal level, her increasing physical bloom and vigor are simply the fruits of a more active way of life. But Silas Foster's country-shrewd prescription of fresh milk and cow's breath to make the girl “look like a creature of this world” (31) applies equally to the whole experiment, which could not become substantial until its members had experienced the hearty realities of the farm. It was only after some time at Blithedale that Coverdale could feel at all confident that the “girl had human blood in her veins” (51) and only after some time in field work and communal life that he could begin to talk, even jokingly, of the community's future—that is, could imagine its perseverance as a thing of this world, a human possibility. He argues that work “gives substance to the life around us” (243).

As all these parallels establish an identity between the initially insubstantial Priscilla and insubstantial Blithedale, they establish, by implication and contrast, a very different meaning to Zenobia, for she seems to be nothing if not substantial, with her glowing health, her warm flesh, her sensuality, her “noble earthliness” (101). Despite their common father, she is Priscilla's rival as well as her sister. Zenobia represents the world of actuality in its most attractive forms, the hearty, pleasant, half-animal existence, sharing in the “brisk throb of human life,” to which Coverdale refers in his fever (40). Cheerfully selfish and indolent, that society of hearty dinners, pleasant rooms, good books, and warm fires is fully satisfying to one not in a reflective mood, and its pleasures leave most people who enjoy them uninterested in the utopian vision of a better order of society, which seems pale and unreal by comparison. When Zenobia is at the peak of her power, Priscilla is most pale and thin; when Zenobia grasps Hollingsworth's hand in her own warm one, Priscilla “droops” and the life “seemed to pass out of her, and even the substance of her figure to grow thin and grey” (125). Just so, Zenobia's powerful empirical reality makes the experimental reality of the community “show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women are making a play-day of the years that were given us to live in” (21). To live in. Ordinary life, the utopia-in-the-body that Whitman celebrated in his paean to the body electric, presents a powerful lure with which any idea of a better life must compete. This is the private utopia which Hawthorne experienced in his Old Manse idyll.

Perhaps it was because Hawthorne came so late to the world of the body that he felt its power so strongly. Compared to his 1837 rumination on the “excruciating agonies which Nature inflicts on men” who break her laws, his Manse hymn, almost exactly five years later, to the “infinite generosity and exhaustless bounty of our Mother Nature” represents a remarkable shift of emphasis (American Notebooks 155, 346). At the Manse, he is absorbed in literal reality: golden squashes and pumpkins, bouquets of pond lilies, the brilliant red of the cardinal flower, the rich mosaic of Indian corn. Except for a proposal for “studying the character of a pig,” he even gives up the character analysis that fills so many pages of his earlier journals (328). These passages are filled with half-joking descriptions of himself as Adam, Sophia as Eve, and the Manse as Paradise: they drink “milk from some ambrosial cow,” enjoy the “ethereal dainties” of the marriage bed. “I seem to have cast off all care,” he wrote, “and live with as much easy trust in Providence as Adam could possibly have felt before he learned that there was a world beyond Paradise” (316, 331). The whole is expressed in images of abundance, vigor, ripeness, rotundity—the images, in short, which would inform his later description of Zenobia.

This sort of individualist utopia is usually the dream-child of youth, health, and prosperity or the hope of it. It is full of the “pride and pomp” (15) that characterize Zenobia and her father the “man of show,” whose life was all surface, who took his delights in the glitter of material goods and physical pleasures. Zenobia is associated with these earthly delights through both metaphor and literal detail. But her glittering reality is inevitably flawed, incomplete. In her outward beauty and inward “corruption” (as Coverdale would conceive it), Zenobia is like “Frau Welt,” the image in gothic statuary of the world as a lovely woman whose back side is covered with “sores, ulcers, worms, and all manner of pestilence” (Lederer 37). Hawthorne establishes her allegorical identity with die Welt by one strong juxtaposition of details: immediately after Coverdale speculates that Zenobia may be presenting herself to the deluded Hollingsworth as a woman with “no mortgage on her affections nor claimant to her hand” (127)—in more direct terms, as a virgin—he describes the world itself as having “imposed itself” on every “deluded generation” as a “hitherto unwedded bride” (128). Zenobia has been tainted by her contact with the skeptical Professor Westervelt; perhaps it is not too farfetched to associate Westervelt with the Western World's tradition of skepticism, which “smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations and makes the rest ridiculous” (101). He is “altogether earthy, worldly, made for time and its gross objects, and incapable … of so much as one spiritual idea” (241). The inherent flaw of the utopia of the body, of course, is its materiality. Zenobia's symbol is the flower which must be renewed every day; casually flinging her faded flower to the ground, she acts out the heartlessness of nature's world, in which all pleasures pass. Despite her seeming substantiality, Zenobia is “an enchantress” (45) like her ghostly sister, is changeable and fluid; Priscilla remarks that Zenobia's beauty makes her more like a dream than Priscilla herself (169). For of course, the private utopia is as much a creature of the mind as is the communal utopian project, though the first is extrapolated from what we find in experience and the second from what we find lacking in it. The achieved substantiality of a place or a person is a function of its relationship to the perceiver, its position in a “reality field” created out of sympathetic emotion and active involvement, and weakened by disillusionment and distance. Coverdale's quarrels with Hollingsworth and the others take away the “bright color and vivid reality” from Blithedale (138); his alienation from them leaves his “poor individual life … attenuated of much of its proper substance” (157). As Hawthorne wrote elsewhere, “Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity …” (American Notebooks 223). By extension, when the heart is alienated, this reality fades again to shadow.

When the lover of reality is forced to see that there is a “world beyond Paradise,” the power of that paradise fades and the power of the imagined utopia increases. When Hollingsworth learns of Zenobia's contamination, her treachery to her sister-idea, and her bankruptcy, he rejects her magnificent solidity in favor of Priscilla's vague beauties, for he “can give affection only to one whom he might absorb into himself” (167). The same is true of Coverdale, who loves Priscilla not “for her realities … but for the fancy-work” in which he has “idly decked her out” (100). Reality is never, finally, what we want, or not for long; but the dream of perfection can be exactly what we wish for, servant and lover, so long as we do not attempt to make it real. As Priscilla gains power over the man Zenobia loves, Zenobia's once-warm hand becomes “cold as a veritable piece of snow” (227); in the end, she is reduced to a cold and horribly rigid “statue”—a corpse. The ungainliness of death is the final end of all these sensual pleasures, and the knowledge of this truth is what alienates the yearning soul from the earthly paradise.

In this context, Zenobia's legend of the “Silvery Veil” has a fairly straightforward meaning. Though the tale sheds little light, allegorical or literal, on the triangular relationships between Zenobia, Priscilla, and Westervelt or the other men, it says a great deal about utopian endeavors. Theodore, “who prided himself upon his common sense” (110) and “whose natural tendency was towards scepticism,” has been contaminated by the Westervelts of the world who will take nothing on faith, who deny the possibility of a “pure and generous purpose” (113); he is also a common type of participant or participating observer of utopian communities. Such a person may join the group, but never with full commitment, refusing to trust in the essential beauty of the idea for fear of acting the fool. By insisting on seeing the idea made flesh before fully joining the enterprise, the skeptic loses his chance of taming “down to human bliss” that insubstantial ideal; and yet, once having glimpsed its lovely face, he is doomed forever to long for it, “to desire, and waste life in a feverish quest, and never meet it more” (114): precisely the fate of Coverdale, who shares with Theodore the need to peek behind veils. His desire to see the project realized before fully committing himself cuts him off from the community and finally from both the worldly utopia and the idealized one. Coverdale has a strong materialist streak. A part of him responds to Westervelt's sneering cynicism (102) and will mock the community when he is with those “inclined to ridicule” it (195). Before going to Blithedale, he wallowed in a bachelor's paradise as sensual as that of the communal pigs who are “buried alive in their own corporeal substance” (144), and when he escapes from the community to Boston, he finds the sordid city life completely fascinating, feels “as if there could never be enough of it” (146). Yet though he delights in the exuberance and variety of this substantial world, he hesitates to plunge into its “muddy stream” (147), for another part of him recognizes the something ignoble about its self-absorption and lack of reflectiveness. Admiring the frankly sensual paintings of food in the saloon, he focuses less on their realism than on their “indescribable, ideal charm” which “took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest, and thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial” (176). This charm is also that of Zenobia, who combines richness and nobility with a warm substantiality.

This same part of Coverdale which desires an idealized reality holds him aloof from actual reality, watching and waiting for the signs of imperfection; he is paralyzed by his own perceptiveness. As an artist, an epicure of intellectual as well as physical sensations, he is drawn by the beauty of the idea of Blithedale, but is incapable of giving himself completely to the enterprise. Hollingsworth says Coverdale is “not in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer” (68), and this lack of earnestness is shown by the way in which he insists upon retaining his objectivity, taking himself out of and away from the community so that he may see it more clearly. Like Theodore, he prides himself upon his powers of observation, and he chooses an observation post so high above the community, both literally and figuratively, that the “whole matter” looks “ridiculous” (100). Self-appointed chronicler of the community, he prevents himself from really belonging to it, from forming any significant bonds with his three “friends,” and finally must desire the end of the community so that his chronicle too might find an end, an aesthetically pleasing structure, unlike the untidiness of an ongoing history. He is no more able to plunge into the clear stream of Blithedale than the muddy one of conventional reality. Mistrusting his substantial bachelor world as ignoble, mistrusting the more noble world of Blithedale as insubstantial, he everlastingly sits the fence between the two worlds—frankly admiring Zenobia, but suspecting her motives and her purity; “in love” with Priscilla, but incapable of speaking his love to her, seemingly incapable of speaking to her at all except in a teasing or challenging way. He ends a ridiculous figure, still the minor poet enjoying good wine and good food, but feeling that his life somehow lacks substance because of the absence of that higher purpose with which he briefly flirted.

Hollingsworth is a dweller and a maker in the world of substantial reality; formerly a blacksmith, a shaper of iron, he now seeks to build a reformatory where he might shape the insubstantial reality of human souls. It is Hollingsworth who actually brings Priscilla to Blithedale; action is capable, where art is not, of bringing the ideal into the realm of the real. But this same practical energy leads him to focus on the material aspects of the project, spending endless hours drawing plans for the edifice that will embody his idea, and in so doing he loses touch with the ideal. He is the type of utopian who becomes so obsessed with structures that he neglects the spirit of the enterprise. It is Zenobia with whom he consults, Zenobia the substantial, the material, though he has little appreciation of her magnificent beauty; he is only conscious of the practical benefits she can offer. When he transfers his allegiance to Priscilla, the new heiress, his rejection of substantial reality “kills” it; the resulting consciousness of his own crime incapacitates him for further action in the substantial world. Both Hollingsworth and Coverdale end disappointed, somehow weakened and incapable of a really full life as a result of their contact with the utopian ideal. But this is not, if the book is read allegorically rather than literally, a condemnation of that ideal itself.

It has become fashionable to ridicule utopian experiments—just as it was fashionable in Hawthorne's time, and within recent memory, to participate in them—and certainly, one rarely finds a real-life utopian to be as wise, as good, or even as witty as one might hope. But simple condemnation or mockery was not within Hawthorne's mental repertoire. And The Blithedale Romance stands as a qualified affirmation of the utopian dream. For only that communal ideal endures, the heiress of her sister's substantial fortune, a faithful companion and prop to Hollingsworth, an ineradicable memory of something precious and forever lost to the poet who could not let go of his worldly pleasures. Coverdale speaks the first and last words of the romance, and first and last he sees Blithedale as having embodied what “ought to be a truth” (246). To Hawthorne, for whom the essential truth of the insubstantial was an ongoing concern, the very evanescence of the experiment, its lack of substance, might be taken as evidence of its enduring value, for essence is always impalpable, and “airiest fragments … will possess a value that lurks not in the most ponderous realities” (11). Whatever the difficulties of transubstantiating the utopian ideal, the ideal itself remains untainted and eternally haunting.

Notes

1. See, for example, the early spirited exchange between Cargill, Randel, and Warren on the Zenobia/Fuller and Hollingsworth/Channing links.

2. For the concept of oscillation I am indebted to Suvin.

3. See Doherty for a discussion of The Scarlet Letter and Calvinist utopianism.

4. Notable are Richard Redgrave's “The Semptstress” (1844) and George Frederic Watt's “The Seamstress” (ca. 1850). See Roberts. The nineteenth-century seamstress worked twelve to twenty hours a day for less than subsistence wages.

5. Webber is a particularly egregious example.

Works Cited

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———. The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe. Vol. 3. 1964.

———. The American Notebooks. Vol. 8. 1974.

———. The Letters, 1813-1843. Vol. 15. 1984.

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