Abstract
IN the late 1830s Nathaniel Hawthorne became uncomfortably aware that his writings about Man's moral life had no objective basis in truth but were mere moonshine from the cloudland of his youthful imagination. Largely as a result of this insight, the tale eventually gave way to romance, moralizing was replaced by observation, and the ethos of story by a pathology of the Self grounded in contemporary philosophy. That analysis of the Self, initiated in The Scarlet Letter (a study of the effects of isolation on the Self's faculties of perception and judgment published in 1850) was pursued in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852).' The Blithedale Romance is unique, however, because the crime that drives its plot is not social or moral but one of contemporary ideology, a crime grounded in Hawthorne's real-life experiences at Brook Farm. Critics have had much of interest to say about this crime and the
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