Introduction to Transatlanticism andThe Blithedale Romance

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Blithedale Romance in 1852: the beginning of a decade of profound ideological shifts on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., these shifts became more evident with the outbreak of violent confrontations in Kansas over slavery, a conflict that would eventually escalate into the Civil War. Across the Atlantic, the Crimean War was redefining both the modern European state and modern warfare, with telegraphs, locomotives, explosive navel shelling, and trenches playing a new and defining role in military conflicts (Royle, 42, 94, 507). Discontent, violent conflict, and forced displacement were neither local nor limited matters in the 1850s, but prompted migration of staggering numbers across continents and oceans. As early as 1852, Hawthorne understood that, as the world was modernizing and people were resettling, popular visions of the future were evolving rapidly. Dreams of settled agrarian Utopias based upon shared manual labor--like those imagined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, Robert Owen, Joseph Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, or by the residents of Blithedale in Hawthorne's novel--seemed to belong in the past. The coal-powered locomotive and speed of transport enthralled the modern imagination, surpassing the antiquated charm of the farm and the romance of walking. It was the dawn of the age of fossil fuels; in the 1850s, the most compelling visions of the future would be those of ever-innovating industrial Utopia and ever-expanding urban life, of mechanized production and rapid transportation across a world that was becoming ever more anonymous. Such were the visions of young American engineers like William Jackson Palmer (1836-1909), who later in life founded the modern city of Colorado Springs, a Utopian community entirely dependent upon coal. If, as Palmer sensed, the future was in coal, it could not be, as Hawthorne came to recognize, in the reorganization of agrarian life. An avid walker himself despite the changing culture, Hawthorne reflects on the shifting sensibilities of the times in The Blithedale Romance. In it, he presents not without melancholy the agrarian vision of a harmonious pastoral life, which had come from European and British Romanticism, as arriving in America too late to be of much consequence. On the other hand, the transatlantic and transcontinental migrations occurring in unprecedented numbers promised opportunities for self-reinvention and renewal of entire communities. In the 1840s and 50s, Utopian colonies proliferated across the United States as European immigration rose dramatically and rail lines replaced overland trails into the West. Not only did coal speed ships across the Atlantic and locomotives into the far reaches of the American West but because of the mobility that it granted, coal also had a transformative influence on the way people saw themselves, understood where and how they lived, and how they perceived the world around them. The shift to fossil fuel affected visions of the future, not only in the industrial imagination, but also in the literary imagination. Nearly two decades earlier, William Wordsworth had written a sonnet on Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways (1833) in which one might expect to discover a rejection of these landscape-altering technologies. However, in asserting that Nature doth embrace/Her lawful offspring in Art (11. 10-11, p. 569), Wordsworth evidently did not detect what Hawthorne would see later in The Blithedale Romance: if the increased mobility of modernity allowed people to relocate and reinvent themselves, it did just as much to unsettle and alienate them from the land and from each other. In the age of coal, Man's Art no longer had need for the maternal embrace of Nature--people could live comfortably far removed from the land and the cooperative activities of agricultural production that sustained them. For steamship- and train-travelers in the 1850s, the natural world, agricultural lands, and agrarian society--seen now from moving windows--receded into the distance. …