The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nathaniel HawthorneEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-01
ISBN: 1604502207
Number of pages: 188
Publisher: Tark Classic Fiction
Book Reviews of The Blithedale Romance
Book Review: An Awkward, Ungainly Mish-mash...
Summary: 5 Stars
... but still worth reading if: 1. you are seriously interested in Hawthorne, Melville, and other writers of America's first literary generation; 2. for its depiction of Brook Farm, the influential experiment in utopian socialism of the 1840s; 3. for its ambivalent depiction of feminism among the Transcendentalists.
"The Blithedale Romance" is undeniably an ambitious juggling act. In addition to its serious social themes of feminism and reformism, it's truly a 'romance', a melodramatic love-quadrangle resulting in multiple tragedies. It's also a "Gothic" novel, dabbling in popular spiritualism and mysticism yet sneering at itself for doing so. A large part of the failure of the novel as such comes from Hawthorne's inability to keep so many balls in the air. Nonetheless, anyone knowledgeable about social history will find 'Blithedale' a virtual documentation of the inchoate state of American culture in the 1840s. There are, by the way, passages of beautiful lyricism as well as others of picturesque charm; in one chapter, for example, the narrator, a 'temperance' man, sits in a New York tavern, watching for a mysterious derelict who is the key to the story. The narrator paints a rich picture of New York life by describing the paintings on the wall of the tavern. Hawthorne, it seems to me, wrote better sentences than chapters, and better chapters than novels.
Brook Farm was only the best-recorded of the many utopian communities founded in the USA in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Some of them were based on religious enthusiasms, some were philosophical, but several were essentially built around pre-Marxian communism. Brook Farm was launched as a joint stock commune of philosophical bent and evolved in a few years into a rigid socialism that disappointed "free spirits" among its founders. Hawthorne was in fact one of the founders and a member of the board, so to speak, but he withdrew in dismay after less than a year. Literary scholars of the 20th C have tended to treat Hawthorne as a "conservative" who rejected social and political reform. In 'Blithedale', the 'reformer' Hollingsworth is a man of talent and integrity who is 'diminished' by his reform monomania. But the 'anti-reformer' Coverdale, the failed poet narrator, is equally diminished by his inability to commit his talents and energies to anything worthwhile. Hawthorne himself was a study in ambivalence and irresolution, as peculiar and variable as any of his characters.
If, after this hesitant recommendation, you decide to read The Blithedale Romance, be sure to take a look at the wikipedia account of the real Brook Farm. It's worth knowing that American society has had a radical socialist strain from its very beginning. The Utopians were as much heirs of the Revolution as the Hamiltonian Whigs or the anti-government Jacksonians.
Summary of The Blithedale Romance
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