This is the second time I’ve read The Blithedale Romance. The first time was fall semester of my freshman year, so the timing is actually kind of perfect. The first class was on Gothic fiction. I don’t remember it perfectly, but I think we were talking about nature as a gothic enclosure—trapping the characters and creating a sense of claustrophobia is a big part of gothic fiction. We might also have talked about Zenobia and Priscilla as ghostly entities and doubles for each other.
At the beginning of the semester, I think Professor Newman mentioned that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance as a satire mocking Transcendentalist communes like Brook Farm. That’s how I’ve been reading it this time, and coming at the book from that perspective transforms it completely. There’s a passage at the beginning when the narrator and his friends are riding to Blithedale through an April snowstorm. They meet a traveler on the road and greet him, and instead of replying, he keeps walking. The narrator complains that “this lack of faith in our cordial sympathy, on the traveler’s part, was one among the innumerable tokens how difficult a task we had in hand for the reformation of the world” (8). In the Gothic class, we would have read these as evidence of enclosure and foreshadowing. The snowstorm makes them feel claustrophobic, especially in the city. The unfriendly traveler and the snowstorm would also have foreshadowed bad things to come.
Some of these elements are the same when you read the book as a satire—the snow storm and the rude traveler still seem like foreshadowing—but I think that the narrator’s irritation at the traveler is more a joke than anything else. Of course the traveler isn’t feeling friendly! It’s wet, windy, and freezing. I would not pal around with strangers in those conditions either. The narrator’s expectation that after the revolution, everyone will be constantly cheerful is naïve and kind of hilarious. He’s so absorbed in an ideal that he can’t process reality any more. This seems like a significant way to burn the Transcendentalists.
My freshman year, we also read Zenobia’s hothouse flowers as creepy characterization—she’s unnatural, not of this world, the flower is evidence of this. Now I think it might be a comment on Transcendentalist ideals about nature and poverty. Women were associated with nature. They were supposed to be nurturing, restorative, and passive. Zenobia is none of these things, and the flower, which could never grow in New England outside of a hot house, represents this. I don’t think Hawthorne is criticizing this stereotype of femininity, I think he’s pointing to the hypocrisy of romanticizing nature and poverty that some Transcendentalists seem to be guilty of. Working the land and having little money is seen as the ideal, leading to morality and freedom from the constraints of society, but true poverty often constrained people more. A lot of Transcendentalists don’t seem to have understood this. Many of them also seem to have had money cushions, so if they got tired of living in poverty in the middle of nowhere, they could easily leave. Zenobia’s flower represents all of this: it’s natural but it doesn’t appear in nature, it’s simple but it’s also costly. There are lots of other examples of the characters having ideals but not acting on them all the time, but this is the one that stuck out. It’s really interesting to me to see how this book changes and stays the same depending on the framework I use to read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment