Possibilities Lost: Transcendental Declarations of Independence in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Abstract

The Blithedale Romance occupies a unique position in the Haw-thorneian corpus for at least two reasons: Hawthorne's use of a first-person narrator and his decision to base, albeit loosely, the fictional Blithedale on his experiences as a resident at Brook Farm, an actual Utopian community founded by the transcendentalist minister George Ripley in 1841. If The Blithedale Romance constitutes a new point of departure for Hawthorne's fictional project, it is nevertheless a point of departure that Hawthorne, in particular in his prefaces, had contemplated all along. Hawthorne's fidelity to a new kind of fiction that more closely approximates lived experience would seem to be a betrayal of his notion of romance, which does not, like the novel, aim to be faithful to “the probable and ordinary course of man's experience,” but it is part and parcel of Hawthorne's anxieties about the transgressions of representation, transgressions peculiar to the kind of fictional project Hawthorne attempts to prosecute (Seven Gables, 1). While Hawthorne's preface to The Blithedale Romance celebrates his romances as “a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phan-tasmagorical antics (38), his preface to The House of the Seven Gables warns that romance runs the risk of sinning unpardonably; that it commits, in other words, a “literary crime” (1). Our concern with Hawthorne as a writer seems all the more urgent, indeed necessary, given the connections Hawthorne seeks to establish between himself and his self-confessed minor poet and alter ego Miles Coverdale.