The Gender Roles

I will start off by saying that this is a pleasant change from what we’ve
read before. Although I did enjoy reading some passages of Thoreau,
Emerson, and the other transcendentalists, Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale
Romance” is a refreshing alternative piece of prose, as opposed to the
more philosophical writing. It’s interesting to see that although
Hawthorne was also part of the “transcendentalist movement” and an active
member in Brooks farm, how different his writing and his way of
Transcending his thoughts through literature are from the other writers.
However, I am still not exactly sure if Hawthorne truly identified himself
as a transcendentalist?(maybe wasn’t as radically manifested than the
rest) To what extent was his writing devoted to the movement itself? Other than talking about his experiences at the farm. Another thing that I found fairly compelling was his description of women. From what I have read, I find that the transcendentalists did not pay much attention to gender, nor did they ever express any thoughts of gender roles in the community. Even thinking back to Thoreau, never once did he mention that his act of cleaning and taking care of the house as a woman’s role…nor did he ever mention in “Walden” that he needed a woman to do all of these tasks. This idea of dismissing any sort of Gender Role is fairly progressive and a common thread that’s laced in transcendentalist writing. It is in “The Blithedale Romance” that I found a bit more attention being paid to gender. Though is could just be because this particular piece of literature is fiction as opposed to the other non-fiction, theory based writers. At times I was not sure whether or not Hawthorne intended this- but the narrator –Mr. Coverdale” spends a lot of time describing women, especially within the first section of the story when the audience is introduced to “the veiled Lady,” also known as: Zenobia. At times he goes in depth about her physical appearance, all of which he fancies, -here perfectly Eve like body- including her hands. Though to contrast to such attention paid to her physical appearance there are instances where he touches upon gender roles, “What a pity I remarked, that the kitchen and the house work generally cannot be left out of our system altogether! It is odd enough, that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just which chiefly distinguishes artificial life- the life of degenerated mortals-from the life of Paradise. Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day.”(pg. 16) and then later he goes further into this analysis between the relationships between men and women, “We seldom meet with women, now-a-day, and in this country, who impress us as being women at all; their sex fades away and goes for nothing, in ordinary intercourse. Not so with Zenobia. (pg. 17) There are other instances further along, but I was a bit confused on the narrator’s stance regarding women, because his opinion seems to change when he’s talking about women with other men, and then his views are somewhat different when the audience is able to get into his stream of thought. Maybe this concept will get fleshed out more as the reading continues. Regardless, I felt that it was interesting that for the first time in the readings from the Transcendentalists that I felt any attention given on gender and gender roles.