American Anxiousness: Selfhood and Culture in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Abstract

ing effort to disguise its own emptiness. Within the novel, personal and communal anxiety is expressed in various forms of uneasiness about the authenticity of the self and in the fantasies of power and acts of domination that assuage that uneasiness: in Coverdale's fear of exposure, in the attraction of veiling and masquerading, in the fascination with occult access to the secrets-and thus to the selvesof others. The book's combination of interests-in the elaborately defended psyches of its characters, in the forms of cultural expression that manifest the shared anxieties of the community, and in the new emotions and experiences that belong to life in the city-reveals that in this romance Hawthorne is engaged in a striking act of cultural diagnosis. He is identifying what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling: a specific historical moment-here, the emergence of a careening market economy in the middle years of the nineteenth century-as it expresses itself in private feeling and in the cultural forms a community produces.'