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The Blithedale Romance (1852) was Nathaniel Hawthorne's third major romance. In Hawthorne (1879), Henry James called it "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Hawthorne's "unhumorous fictions."

Plot Introduction

Most of the action takes place at Blithedale (i.e., "Happy Valley"), a would-be modern Arcadia that is founded upon anti-capitalist ideals, yet is nonetheless destroyed by the self-interested behavior of some of its members. Among those members are: Hollingsworth, a philanthropic misogynist who intends to turn Blithedale into a colony for the reformation of criminals; Zenobia, a strong-minded feminist who ironically finds Hollingsworth's misogyny irresistible; Priscilla, a sweet, shy teenage girl who turns out to be Zenobia's half-sister; and Miles Coverdale, the unreliable narrator, a minor poet given to acts of voyeurism.

The Blithedale Romance and Brook Farm

Blithedale is based loosely on Brook Farm, a short-lived agricultural and educational commune where Hawthorne lived from April to November 1841. In the novel's preface, Hawthorne describes his memories of this temporary home as "essentially a daydream, and yet a fact" which he employs as "an available foothold between fiction and reality." His feelings of affectionate scepticism toward the commune are reflected not only in the novel, but also in his journal entries and in the numerous letters he wrote from Brook Farm to Sophia Peabody, his future wife.

Hawthorne's claim that the novel's characters are "entirely fictitious" has been widely questioned. The character of Zenobia, for example, is said to have been modelled upon Margaret Fuller, an acquaintance of Hawthorne and a frequent guest at Brook Farm. The circumstances of Zenobia's death, however, were not inspired by the shipwreck that ended Fuller's life but by the suicide of a certain Miss Hunt, a refined but melancholy young woman who drowned herself in a river on the morning of July 9, 1845. Hawthorne helped to search for the body that night, and later recorded the incident at considerable length in his journal. Suggested prototypes for Hollingsworth include Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horace Mann, while the narrator is often supposed to be none other than Hawthorne himself.

Notes

1. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance: an Authoritative Text; Background and Sources; Criticism (Seymour Gross, Editor). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978, pp. 253-257.
2. ibid., p. 270.
3. ibid., p. 272.

External links

• The Blithedale Romance at Project Gutenberg

1. 1
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• 1852 books
• 19th Century American Fiction