“I saw a concourse of strange figures”: The Masque, Voyeurism, and Coverdale's Self-Consciousness in The Blithedale Romance

Abstract

Judging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's early preoccupations in his short fiction, he had more than a passing interest in the English masque tradition. His 1835 short story "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" dramatizes the English masque tradition, refracted through a melodramatic marriage tale full of anti-Puritan ideology. Hawthorne's story features the pagan celebration of Midsummer's Eve, a festival that occasions the marriage of the Lord and the Lady of the dance, Edgar and Edith (9:54, 58). The English Miltonic masque tradition of Comus (1634) is Hawthorne's influence for the masque portrayal; Milton's work is referenced twice in this short story (9:57, 64). What Hawthorne stylizes into narrative form are specific rituals from the English masque tradition, particularly the erection of the maypole, around which is the celebratory dance; pastoral imagery ("fauns and nymphs," 9:55); and the convergence or hybridity of English folk traditions within an American rural scene. "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" serves as an early prelude to Hawthorne's more sustained study of the masque tradition in his later novel The Blithedale Romance, which begins with one masque scene and ends with Miles Coverdale in another in Chapter 24. The entertainment at Blithedale is not limited to masque performance, although, as Coverdale recalls, a costumed "tableau vivant" and public "readings from Shakespeare" indicate that Hawthorne perceives the Blithedale experiment as an exploration of the dominant forms and expressions of nineteenth-century entertainment (3:106). Hawthorne's use of the masque ritual in The Blithedale Romance suggests that he was experimenting with the limits of the genre. That is, he combines the masque's stylistic conventions with his own interest in large-scale nineteenth-century American spectatorship and entertainment, including the tableau vivant, diorama, and rural spiritualist performances. Components of the masque ritual that Hawthorne incorporates into the novel include: the prescribed "invitation to dance" extended to the courtly lord; the use of elaborate costumery; the blending of reality and illusion and the overall dreamlike atmosphere of the production; the coronation of the masque king and queen; and the recourse to the masque's pastoral and folk English traditions, including classical references and rural performances. Unlike "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," The Blithedale Romance uses a first-person narrator, one whose withdrawal from, and subsequent entrance into, the masque performance is the novel's most conspicuous use of this genre's traits. Masques arose in sixteenth-century England and Europe as a courtly form of entertainment with folk, or country, origins. As the masque became popularized in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, certain formal features became more elaborate, including "complex" dances in the "formation of geometric shapes and intricate patterns," and dances "filled" with "classical references" and other "literary conventions" ("History"). This stylized form of entertainment for the aristocracy was Arcadian, or pastoral, in origin and theme, and came from the classical or neoplatonic tradition. Milton's famous masques, including Arcades, which may very well have been Hawthorne's inspiration, and Comus, which he also mentions in "The Masqueraders" chapter, enact rural allegories of competing Arcadian queens in which one is portrayed more favorably than the other (Lewalski 300-01). Hawthorne's most prominent use of a masque appears in "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," which John E Birk argues follows the tradition of Milton's "L'Allegro": "'L'Allegro' and the first half of the tale feature like terminologies, call up goddesses of mirth, and evoke rustic sites marked by jovial beasts and stock rustics engaged in hie et nunc [here and now] pagan pleasures" (44). Hawthorne employs the pastoral, rustic elements of this courtly form of entertainment in "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" and then fully develops them in The Blithedale Romance. …