Observing Manners in Hawthorne'sBlithedale

Abstract

In a backhanded but perceptive apologia for the "triumph ... of the provincial perspective" in Hawthorne's Our Old Home (1863), Henry James explains that his precursor "had in mind the array of English voyagers--Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss Martineau, Mr. Grattan"--whose widely-read and frequently acerbic commentaries on America had set the tone for transatlantic travel writing. Provincial or not, Hawthorne could hardly be blamed for observing "the amenities of criticism" (145) established by such writers at dyspeptic intervals in his English sketches. Several moments in The Blithedale Romance suggest that Hawthorne had British criticisms of America in mind already in 1851, as he revisited the Utopian experiment in social equality that he had imprudently invested in at Brook Farm. More specifically, as this essay argues, The Blithedale Romance reflects on a prolific Anglo-American controversy concerning the significance of American manners as indicators of democracy's actual and potential success. In the ironic etiquette-consciousness that pervades his recollections of Blithedale, Miles Coverdale bears a striking resemblance to British travelers who described the United States as a failed utopia long before the Civil War threatened, as Hawthorne put it to Franklin Pierce in the opening dedication of Our Old Home, to reduce "our nation and its polity" to "the fragments of a shattered dream" (5:4). Debates on the "Condition-of-America Question" (as Elizabeth Deis and Lowell Frye have called it (1)) attracted diverse American participants whose contributions reflected durably colonial anxieties, but also the market revolution's rapid transformation of urban middle-class life, and the antebellum reform movement's hopeful, if heterogeneous visions of moral and social progress. As a result, a controversy about American manners entangled itself with topics that might well have seemed, and have surely come to seem, incalculably more urgent than etiquette: slavery, class relations, and women's rights, among others. (2) While they reveal a close familiarity with the variously-motivated observations of English travelers, the many comments on refinement and politeness in Blithedale refer as well to the views of American etiquette experts and social reformers, who spoke differently, if not always antithetically, to transatlantic evaluations of republican culture. At the nexus of the literatures of travel, conduct, and reform, my reading articulates the layered significances these literatures attached to the act of visiting, highlighting the complex sequence of visits that advances Hawthorne's plot. The arrivals and departures of the main characters, and the recognitions, salutations, and hospitalities they exchange, gracefully or otherwise, combine polite social calling, benevolent social intervention, and critical social observation. Where it stages these forms of visitation, The Blithedale Romance embroils its "visionary transcendentalists" (3:115) in a utopian tragicomedy of manners with deceptively high stakes. Politeness, Refinement, and the Politics of Visitation On his original journey to a not-yet-failed utopia at some convenient distance from Boston, Hawthorne's narrator finds no well-wishers lining the path. The strangers that he and his companions meet and hail on that cold day remain unimpressed by their friendliness, and never promise to become fellow-travelers in any significant sense: Sometimes, encountering a traveller, we shouted a friendly greeting; and he, unmuffling his ears to the bluster and the snow-spray, and listening eagerly, appeared to think our courtesy worth less than the trouble which it cost him. The churl! He understood the shrill whistle of the blast, but had no intelligence for our blithe tones of brotherhood. This lack of faith in our cordial sympathy, on the traveller's part, was one among the innumerable tokens how difficult a task we had in hand, for the reformation of the world. …