Narrative Form in The Blithedale Romance

Abstract

N A R R A T IV E F O R M IN T H E B L I T H E D A L E R O M A N C E * DOUGLAS HILL Erindale College, University of Toronto Conspicuous among the elements of American experience that nurture the rich literary harvest of the early 1850s is an increasing and unprecedented reliance upon first-person experiential narrative to record the journeys of the metaphysical or fictional imagination. Emerson’s Nature, the travel-books of Dana, Parkman, Margaret Fuller and Thoreau, Cooper’s last six novels, Melville’s first five — each of these is an exploration of the form that triumphs in Moby-Dick, Walden, and Song of Myself. The diverse reasons for this concentration of energies include the intangible — the European Renaissance ideal of self and the American Puritan habit of spiritual intro­ spection — as well as the concrete — the extension of national boundaries to the west, north, and south, and the avalanche of factual and quasi-factual narratives of exploration and discovery accompanying it. Although any full investigation of a particular literary mode’s influence at a particular time is beyond the scope of a short paper, a study of what happens when an estab­ lished writer decides to turn his hand to a first-person novel can lead to insights into the effects of the chosen form both upon the surfaces and mean­ ings of that novel itself, and upon the author’s career as a whole.1 The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852, is unique among Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels in its direct dependence upon the inspiration of personal experience. In his preface, Hawthorne describes that sojourn at Brook Farm some ten years earlier as “certainly, the most romantic episode of his own life — essentially a daydream, and yet a fact — and thus offering an avail­ able foothold betewen fiction and reality.”2 The foothold he speaks of might be said to lie between the familiar landscape of the romance-novel and the unexplored territory of the realistic novel, between his accustomed ease in the omniscient, third-person narrative and the peculiar pressures of the firstperson form that his interest in the Brook Farm adventure led him to employ. His attempts to find and keep this foothold mark The Blithedale Romance as the crisis-point in the evolution of his narrative art. Neither his scrapping of Fanshawe (1828) in favour of the short story nor his turning from that medium twenty years later to the longer romance of The Scarlet En g l ish Studies in C anada, vii, 4, December 1981 Letter and The House of the Seven Gables is as significant. For when Haw­ thorne takes up a challenge now, he is unable, for the first time, to master it. Not only does his failure with first-person narrative cause severe problems in The Blithedale Romance. More important, it unfits him for a return to his solid ground of romance, a disability that the torpor of The Marble Faun (i860) and the agonizing efforts to breathe fictional life into his final frag­ ments show all too clearly. Most of Hawthorne’s difficulties in The Blithedale Romance are those of integration. He simply cannot make Brook Farm work conceptually for him in the way that the scarlet “A” or the Pyncheon curse had worked before. They infuse their respective books with symbolic power, the source of which is in Hawthorne’s artistic imagination and only peripherally touched by the circumstances of his personal life. This is not at all to suggest that an author’s actual experiences cannot explicitly inform a novel, but that Haw­ thorne seems to have been unable to find the key that could unlock the potential efficacy of his own for him. At the same time — a misfortune as far as his career was concerned — he seems to have committed himself com­ pletely and irretrievably to the search for that key. His struggles with firstperson narrative are the visible evidence of his search. Hawthorne’s choice of form seems at first glance, especially if one looks at the beginning of the book, to have been both natural and wise. His time...