Hawthorne the Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne`s the Blithedale romance details the lives of several characters who live through the creation and eventual failure of a utopian commune called Blithedale.

Blithedale is founded upon a series of percepts that would be considered transcendentalist. Transcendentalism was an important and persuasive theory in the 19th century often associated with ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalist believed that it was possible to create a system that would allow humanity to live in absolute harmony with nature and one another. Although Nathaniel   Hawthorn was in certain ways sympathetic possibility of putting their ideas into practice. Based on his own experiences at a utopian farm in the 1840, Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance in order to show the deficiency of much of transcendentalist beliefs. Hawthorn uses the experiences of his characters in Blithedale critique transcendentalist ideas, such as romantic idealism, ideal communities, and the relationship of self to others, the possibility of communal soul, and the possibility of an idealized pastoral world existing in contemporary society. Hawthorne satirically demonstrates  the absorb naivety of these transcendentalist notions through the lens of his novel, showing that his characters unswerving devotion to idealized concepts ultimately fails to achieve real world results and that , in many cases, this idealism in fact leads to tragic disaster.

While most of the characters begin their stay at Blithedale strongly believing in the romantic ideals that underlie the commune`s belief system, at the end of the novel, these beliefs are dramatically shaken. In fact, some of the characters begin to wonder what the worth of such idealistic devotions could be in the first place. Faced with a growing disillusionment with Blithedale , the loss of her family fortunes, and depressed by her unrequited love of Hollingsworth, Zenobia commits suicide by drowning herself: indeed, while this decision might seem like a romantic ,impulsive death, since she drowned herself out of love for another person, Westervelt questions the validity of such and intense romantic action. In the end, he suggests that it was a silly and foolish action and that Zenobia would have been better served to ignore her romantic ideas about love and continue to live on:

“No matter what I was to her “he answered, gloomy, yet without actual emotion. “She is now beyond my reach. Had she lived, and hearkened to my counsels, we might have served each other well. But there Zenobia lies, in yonder pit, with the dull earth over her. Twenty years of a brilliant lifetime thrown away for a mere woman`s whim!”

(Hawthorne 241)

Instead of respecting Zenboia`s decision to kill herself over love, Westervelt demeans her impulse, calling it a “women`s whim”. His speech further emphasize how her death is neither ideal nor romantic , stating that she now lies in a pit with “dull earth” over her. Rather than focus on the intensity of her feeling or the profundity of her sacrifice, Westervelt instead focuses on the more pragmatic issue: her wasted potential .Again he notes that “she wasted 20 years of brilliant lifetime” in this action. Encapsulated within this meditation, we see that, by the novel`s end, the residents of Blithedale have almost fully lost their romantic idealism.

Hawthorne`s satirical story is similarly skeptical of the realistic possibility of idealized communities ever working. As if Zenobia`s suicide weren`t enough to show that the difficulties with and idealized community is almost insurmountable, Hollingsworth’s feelings of culpability for Zenobia also demonstrates the difficulties with an idealized community. Miles Coverdale, after seeing Hollingsworth at Zenobia`s funeral, draws he following conclusions about him:

The moral which presents itself to my reflection as drawn from Hollingsworth`s character and errors is simply this :- that , admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession , to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large , it is perilous to the individual , whose ruling passion , in one exclusive channel it thus becomes.

(Hawthorne 243)

Bothe Zenboia and Hollingsworth suggest that excessively devoting oneself to and ideal community ultimately leads to a destruction of the self. Indeed, the altruistic concept of self-sacrifice takes on a literal character here that is in many ways destructive to the community. The most immediate irony here is that Hollingsworth, who wishes to spend his life helping rehabilitate criminals, ends up being the one responsible for “murdering” Zenboia . His zealous adherence this ideals ends up destroying those very ideals. How can the ideal community survive if all of the individuals in It are destroyed in creating it? Indeed, it can`t, and this realization betrays Hawthorne`s intense skepticism regarding the possible function of an ideal social group.