The Allegory and the Radical Romantic Ethic of The Blithedale Romance

Abstract

OST READERS ASSUME there was a single lWl whose opinions were settled, values clear, responses consistent. Some posit two Hawthornes whose colloquy is traceable among his works and occasionally complicates and quickens individual ones. Psychoanalytical critics combine these assumptions in trying to define Hawthorne's basic conflict, an approach that assumes contrary forces but a single integration of them-though disintegration is possible, to be sure, and is often thought to explain Hawthorne's failure late in life to complete any works of fiction. My sense of the communicated in print and of the man who created this public self is somewhat different, although it is closest to the perception of those who see two Hawthornes. My Hawthorne is an allegorist, and allegory to me is a satisfying and inevitable mode for both embodying value and analyzing motives and actions.' I deny the assumption, made by most psychoanalytic critics, that allegory is per se evasive, oine of the ego's most elaborated defenses against unacceptable impulses and truths, and I deny as well the more common assumption that makers of allegories are rmerely rhetoricians, fancifully marshalling figures as skilled debaters marshall arguments. On the contrary, allegory is a mode of apprehension and expression well suited to ambiguous and mysterious material, perhaps best suited of all to exploring the human mind and the ambivalences that are so typical of it. In its explorations and definitions allegory works by contrast, the elements of which are either resolved into parallel expressions of an impulse or truth, or left in conflict (that is, left ambivalent). By seeing doubly, it suggests that there are double viewers-in this case, two Hawthornes. But there may be more. Indeed, complex allegories are the result of complex views