“Turning the Whole Affair into a Ballad” of Misogyny

Abstract

The story of Blithedale dwells on an experimental community reminiscent of the Brook Farm Transcendental group with which Hawthorne had briefly been associated in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Indeed, his participation in the communal experiment served as the germ for the novel, which was written ten years after his one-year stay there, but the impact that his experience among the social reformers had upon the fictitious Blithedale community is a point of much conjecture and debate among critics. Many of them see distinct parallels between Hawthorne's characters and actual persons of the day, while others have rejected any but the slightest resemblance to the actual Brook Farm experimenters. The article focuses on The Blithedale Romance as a novelistic indication of the American misogynistic narratives with its archetypal origins.