Some Rents in the Veil: New Light on Priscilla and Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance

Abstract

H AWTHORNE'S Blithedale Romance has at least three potential means of achieving structural unity: (1) use of a first person narrator-observer; (2) stress on one particular symbolic or emblematic analogue through which each of the principal characters may be identified (Zenobia's flower, Priscilla's purses, Hollingsworth's edifice, Coverdale's window ledge or cave); (3) focus on one place, to which all of the characters relate both physically and psychologically. Yet these potential unifying devices become so entangled in a web of ambiguity that rather than a lucid and integrated aesthetic construct, we have what amounts to a fascinating but elusive dream vision, incorporating many of the inconsistencies and incongruities usually associated with dream experience. There is, as well, a sharp disjunction between the novel's realistic foundation and its symbolic patterns (some might say allegorical ornamentation), so that the terms of the action in the first half are not reciprocated in the second half, while the allegorizing of the final chapters rends the fabric of the action as initially presented. Without going into an elaborate post-mortem dissection of the