How Does Coverdale Come to Love Priscilla?

Abstract

This essay explores how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) reflects the development of optical devices departing from the camera obscura, leading the change in the concept of perception and the blurred boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity. Exploring the trajectory behind Miles Coverdale’s abrupt confession of his love for Priscilla at the end of the work, this essay foregrounds the status of Coverdale as an observer in the camera obscura, an outdated optical device. Isolation, darkness, and distance, which Coverdale attempts to obtain in Blithedale and beyond, are prerequisites for the camera obscura to function properly, but society no longer allows this outdated mode of observation and the distance itself is presented as an obstacle in Coverdale’s search for the truth. In addition, Coverdale is obliged to embrace the notion of his observation as one of many possibilities and to admit that visual reality is subjective and relative. His declaration of love for Priscilla, in the end, comes from his recognition of her as “an optical delusion,” and signals his recognition of the limitations of his outdated mode of observation against the backdrop of changes in visual perception and optics during the nineteenth century.