The Blithedale Romance!

by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio (Editor), Luke Bresky (Editor)

Overview

“The Broadview edition of The Blithedale Romance is an exceptional scholarly achievement.” — Eric J. Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554811236
Publisher:	Broadview Press
Publication date:	07/24/2015
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer.He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a "w" to make his name "Hawthorne" in order to hide this relation.He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. He published his first work in 1828, the novel Fanshawe; he later tried to suppress it, feeling that it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at the Boston Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord,

Date of Birth:

July 4, 1804

Date of Death:

May 19, 1864

Place of Birth:

Salem, Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Plymouth, New Hampshire

Education:

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, 1824

Read an Excerpt

I
Old Moodie

The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.

“Mr. Coverdale,” said he, softly, “can I speak with you a moment?”

As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted with her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science, or the revival of an old humbug. Since those times, her sisterhood have grown too numerous to attract much individual notice; nor, in fact, has any one of them ever come before the public under such skilfully contrived circumstances of stage-effect, as those which at once mystified and illuminated the remarkable performances of the lady in question. Now-a-days, in the management of his “subject,” “clairvoyant,” or “medium,” the exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of our actual life, and extends them over his preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the contrary, all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and artistically contrasted light and shade, were made available in order to set the apparent miracle in the strongest attitude of opposition to ordinary facts. In the case of the Veiled Lady, moreover, the interest of the spectator was further wrought up by the enigma of her identity, and an absurd rumor (probably set afloat by the exhibitor, and at one time very prevalent) that a beautiful young lady, of family and fortune, was enshrouded within the misty drapery of the veil. It was white, with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of a cloud; and falling over the wearer, from head to foot, was supposed to insulate her from the material world, from time and space, and to endow her with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit.

Her pretensions, however, whether miraculous or otherwise, have little to do with the present narrative; except, indeed, that I had propounded, for the Veiled Lady’s prophetic solution, a query as to the success of our Blithedale enterprise. The response, by-the-by, was of the true Sibylline stamp, nonsensical in its first aspect, yet, on closer study, unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has certainly accorded with the event. I was turning over this riddle in my mind, and trying to catch its slippery purport by the tail, when the old man, above-mentioned, interrupted me.

“Mr. Coverdale!—Mr. Coverdale!” said he, repeating my name twice, in order to make up for the hesitating and ineffectual way in which he uttered it—“I ask your pardon, sir—but I hear you are going to Blithedale tomorrow?”

I knew the pale, elderly face, with the red-tipt nose, and the patch over one eye, and likewise saw something characteristic in the old fellow’s way of standing under the arch of a gate, only revealing enough of himself to make me recognize him as an acquaintance. He was a very shy personage, this Mr. Moodie; and the trait was the more singular, as his mode of getting his bread necessarily brought him into the stir and hubbub of the world, more than the generality of men.

“Yes, Mr. Moodie,” I answered, wondering what interest he could take in the fact, “it is my intention to go to Blithedale tomorrow. Can I be of any service to you, before my departure?”

“If you pleased, Mr. Coverdale,” said he, “you might do me a very great favor.”

“A very great one!” repeated I, in a tone that must have expressed but little alacrity of beneficence, although I was ready to do the old man any amount of kindness involving no special trouble to myself. “A very great favor, do you say? My time is brief, Mr. Moodie, and I have a good many preparations to make. But be good enough to tell me what you wish.”

“Ah, sir,” replied old Moodie, “I don’t quite like to do that; and, on further thoughts, Mr. Coverdale, perhaps I had better apply to some older gentleman, or to some lady, if you would have the kindness to make me known to one, who may happen to be going to Blithedale. You are a young man, sir!”

“Does that fact lessen my availability for your purpose?” asked I. “However, if an older man will suit you better, there is Mr. Hollingsworth,3 who has three or four years the advantage of me in age, and is a much more solid character, and a philanthropist to boot. I am only a poet, and, so the critics tell me, no great affair at that! But what can this business be, Mr. Moodie? It begins to interest me; especially since your hint that a lady’s influence might be found desirable. Come; I am really anxious to be of service to you.”

But the old fellow, in his civil and demure manner, was both freakish and obstinate; and he had now taken some notion or other into his head that made him hesitate in his former design.

“I wonder, sir,” said he, “whether you know a lady whom they call Zenobia?”

“Not personally,” I answered, “although I expect that pleasure tomorrow, as she has got the start of the rest of us, and is already a resident at Blithedale. But have you a literary turn, Mr. Moodie?—or have you taken up the advocacy of women’s rights?—or what else can have interested you in this lady? Zenobia, by-the-by, as I suppose you know, is merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she comes before the world, retaining all the privileges of privacy—a contrivance, in short, like the white drapery of the Veiled Lady, only a little more transparent. But it is late! Will you tell me what I can do for you?”

“Please to excuse me to-night, Mr. Coverdale,” said Moodie. “You are very kind; but I am afraid I have troubled you, when, after all, there may be no need. Perhaps, with your good leave, I will come to your lodgings tomorrow-morning, before you set out for Blithedale. I wish you a good-night, sir, and beg pardon for stopping you.”

And so he slipt away; and, as he did not show himself, the next morning, it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been. Arriving at my room, I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate, lighted a cigar, and spent an hour in musings of every hue, from the brightest to the most sombre; being, in truth, not so very confident as at some former periods, that this final step, which would mix me up irrevocably with the Blithedale affair, was the wisest that could possibly be taken. It was nothing short of midnight when I went to bed, after drinking a glass of particularly fine Sherry, on which I used to pride myself, in those days. It was the very last bottle; and I finished it, with a friend, the next forenoon, before setting out for Blithedale.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

The Blithedale Romance

Appendix A: Hawthorne on Brook Farm, Reform, and Social Change

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Selected Letters to Sophia Peabody (April 1841 to June 1842)
2. From “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843, 1846)
3. From “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844, 1846)
4. From “The Old Manse” (1846)
5. From The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Appendix B: Universal Reform and Associationism

1. From George Ripley, Letter to the Church in Purchase Street (1 October 1840)
2. From “‘The Memory and Example of the Just,’ A Sermon, Preached on All Saints’ Day, to the First Church, by Its Minister, N.L. Frothingham. Boston, 1840.” Christian Examiner (January 1841)
3. From Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Chardon Street and Bible Conventions,” The Dial (July 1842)
4. From Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Lectures on the Times,” The Dial (July 1842)
5. From Ralph Waldo Emerson, “New England Reformers” (1844)
6. From Albert Brisbane, “Association and Social Reform,” The Boston Quarterly Review (April 1842)
7. From Charles Lane, “Brook Farm,” The Dial (January 1844)
8. From Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (1847)

Appendix C: Woman Emancipating, Woman Emancipated

1. Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Massachusetts (28 June 1837)
2. From Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, Addressed to Mary S. Parker, President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (1838)
1. From Letter III: The Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts
2. From Letter XII: Legal Disabilities of Women
3. From Catharine E. Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females (1837)
4. From William Lloyd Garrison, “Letter to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society,” The Liberator (16 October 1840)
5. Margaret Fuller, Selected Comments on Woman
1. From “Leila,” The Dial (April 1841)
2. From Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
6. Sophia Ripley, “Woman,” The Dial (January 1841)
7. From Orestes Brownson, “Miss Fuller and Reformers,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review (April 1845)
8. From Oneida Community [John Humphrey Noyes], “Bible Argument; Defining the Relations of the Sexes in the Kingdom of Heaven” (1849)
9. From Theodore Parker, “Sermon of the Public Function of Woman” (1853)

Appendix D: The Fugitive Slave Law and Northern Anti-slavery

1. From the US Constitution, Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
2. From Horace Mann, “Speech to the Massachusetts Convention in Opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law” (1851)
3. Caroline W. Healey Dall, “Amy. A Tale,” Liberty Bell (1849)
4. Antislavery Emblems: “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?”
1. Josiah Wedgwood Antislavery Medallion (1787)
2. Typefounder’s Cut from The Liberator (1832)
3. Kneeling Slave with Dame Justice, from the Cover Page of Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery (1838) by Lydia Maria Child
4. Needlecase Stamped with Antislavery Emblem

Appendix E: Harriet Hosmer, Zenobia in Chains (1859)

Appendix F: Contemporary Reviews of The Blithedale Romance

1. From “Contemporary Literature of America: ‘The Blithedale Romance,’” The Westminster Review (October 1852)
2. Edwin Percy Whipple, Graham’s Magazine (September 1852)

Works Cited and Recommended Reading

Editorial Reviews

"Hawthorne, in putting this novel together, was engaged in the most serious literary enterprise of his career."
—Louis Auchincloss

From the Publisher