Transatlantic Allusions and Illusions inThe Blithedale Romance

Abstract

Marked by sickness and recovery at the outset of spring, Miles Coverdale's early days at the Utopian community portrayed in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance have been interpreted as a symbolic death and rebirth sequence (Merish 176). After surviving a bad cold, a minimalist homeopathic cure, and a diet of wretchedly smoky water-gruel prepared by fellow resident Zenobia, Coverdale not only regains his health but, thanks to an immersion in rigorous outdoor farm work, also acquires an impressively muscular physique. For a while he seems to have become, quite literally, a new man. Gone is not only his cold, but also his previous effete, urban self who wrote graceful lines in a warm, well-carpeted bachelor apartment in Boston. His new body, which the gruff farmer Silas Foster describes in the tones of a proud coach, seems well fitted for the task the Blithedale community has taken upon itself, namely re-building American society. As it soon becomes clear, however, Coverdale's new outward appearance, like other outward appearances in the story, is deceptive. Although he has taken himself out of Boston, he has not quite taken Boston out of himself, as is demonstrated by his return there in August, presumably for a short holiday, and by the remarkable speed with which he resumes his old lifestyle. Hawthorne foreshadows this turn of events in Chapter 6, by giving us access to Coverdale's aching longing, after his first miserable night at Blithedale, for the genteel, privileged comforts he has left behind. In the morning, waking up shivery with fever in his fireless room, Coverdale cannot even contemplate extruding so much as a finger into the icy atmosphere (3:41) around him and wishes the reformation of society might be postponed indefinitely. Although as yet blissfully unaware of the Spartan regimen in store for him in the next few days, Coverdale curses his folly for having joined an enterprise so alien to his temperament and tastes, much more attuned as they are to the delights of his snug, elegant apartment and the hundred dishes at his command for dinner at the Albion House (40). One of the many realistic bits Hawthorne included in his not so aptly named Romance, the reference to the Albion is also part of a transatlantic dialectic that runs like a thread through the book. The name Albion is in fact a powerful reminder of the strong and lasting cultural ties between the young North American republic (New England, in particular) and Great Britain, even while the former was engaged in the construction of a distinctively national and supposedly independent culture. Coverdale's fond evocation of, and evident attachment to, a place whose very name pays homage (and allegiance) to the former mother country, also exposes very early on the ambivalence of his cultural patriotism and of his commitment to a project intended to regenerate American society. Although Coverdale underplays, in rather affected, self-deprecating tones, the relevance of his literary pursuits, he informs us, at the end of the book, that his poems were deemed representative enough to be included in Rufus Wilmot Grisworld's The Poets and Poetry of America (3:246), an actual publication and one of the most nationalistic literary projects published in the United States in the antebellum era. (1) Coverdale's tastes and lifestyle--which seem to mimic those of a British gentleman of leisure--run contrary to his role as a national author. Through the character of Coverdale, whose gaze and voice guide us throughout the narrative, Hawthorne recreates a time and place in America in which the debate over national identity is inevitably affected by cultural and ideological influences, as well as tastes and fashions, from across the Atlantic. Indeed, Hawthorne uses individual susceptibility to these forces as a way to delineate character and delve into personal relationships within the Blithedale community. In this sense, his first-person narrator Coverdale, a voracious reader of catholic tastes (the center-table, in his apartment, is strewn with books and periodicals [3:40]), is a serviceable guide to the community and, for all his passivity, a catalyst for revealing the formidable hurdles on its path. …