How did I forget Zenobia dies?

I’m not sure how, but I completely forgot that Zenobia dies. The only thing I remembered clearly when I started rereading this book was Zenobia greeting Coverdale when he first arrives at Blithedale, with a hothouse flower in her hair. The rest of it started to come back to me as I read. Until Coverdale, Hollingsworth, and Silas Foster go down to the river, however, I completely forgot the suicide. This seems odd to me, because I think that’s where the book really gets good.

I know that sounds morbid, and maybe silly (the suicide made the book SO MUCH BETTER!!!) but I think it did. For me, Blithedale improves when Zenobia dies because it finally starts to feel like Hawthorne is doing something interesting, challenging, and honest with his writing. Most of the book reads like a satire, both of Brook Farm and of a gothic novel. That’s fun in a short piece, and it was probably funny at the time, but it’s not very satisfying to read a novel mocking parts of culture that have long since faded away. After Zenobia dies, the book moves away from satire and into a real story about something that is actually tragic. It’s not easy or fun to read, but those last chapters have more substance than anything at the beginning of the book.

Coverdale finally becomes a whole person at the end of the book, instead of a figure the reader wants to mock. Sometimes main characters who are also jerks are compelling—Little Alex in A Clockwork Orange is a good example. But Coverdale isn’t a horrible person with one beautiful, compelling quality, he’s just ridiculous, nosey, and horny (which is fine, but it’s annoying that he won’t just admit it). Basically, he’s like most people are when the volume is turned up on their less likeable qualities. When he realizes Zenobia has died, he stops being ridiculous. His fear for Zenobia, and his fear of what she has done, his desperation, his despair and certainty that she has died, combined his hope that maybe he’s wrong, are all real emotions you feel when you know something horrible has happened and can’t do anything but clean it up.

His resignation at the end of the book was also compelling. The line “more and more I feel that we had struck upon what ought to be a truth” broke my heart a little (120). It’s so hard to find out that something that should be true—because it would make the world so much better, because it would be fair, because it would redeem a lot of horrible things—isn’t true, or is only true under specific, delicate conditions. I think it’s a big part of growing up, losing your innocence. In his novel Until I Find You, John Irving says, "In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss." Hawthorne and Irving are saying essentially the same thing. Blithedale also deal with the fact that, sometimes, learning these lessons makes people give up entirely. It seems like Coverdale has done that. He’s a casualty of the world, and it’s heartbreaking. It makes me feel bad for disliking him so much for most of the novel, because at least at the beginning he was innocent and hopeful.

That being said, the last line kind of makes me want to slap him (or maybe Hawthorne?)—“I—I myself—was in love—with—PRISCILLA!”

Way to ruin a great ending, Hawthrone. Good job.