She represents a threat while being constructed as a defense against that threat. Efrat Tseelon, The Masque of Femininity Nathaniel Hawthorne often wrote brief notes in his journal of story ideas he might develop, and one of these notes certainly could describe The Blithedale Romance: "To allegorize life with a masquerade, and represent mankind generally as masquers" (American Notebooks 8:122). As several critics note, the main characters in The Blithedale Romance all wear some form of a disguise to conceal something more actual underneath. (1) Priscilla's veil literally hides her identity even while she is made a spectacle on stage. As Samuel Chase Coale argues, "Blithedale becomes a mere veil or disguise for Hollingsworth's schemes" (113). Old Moodies eye patch represents his disguise, covering his past, and Westervelt's false teeth "affect" Coverdale "very oddly," making him feel as if Westervelt's "beauty ... might be removable like a mask" (3:95). Coverdale's name connotes a disguise, and he spends much of the novel hiding from others so that he can observe them without being observed himself. In fact, Coverdale functions as Hawthorne's mask. Edgar Dryden acknowledges that the novel is as close to an autobiography as any of Hawthorne's works but sums up the complex relationship between Hawthorne as author and Coverdale as narrator quite nicely: While Coverdale is certainly an extension of Hawthorne, he "is also a veil or disguise Hawthorne wears and as such is both a manifestation of Hawthorne and, at the same time, a distortion that alters that manifestation" (106). Dryden's description evokes an image of masking where the mask hides the person through a disguise yet acts as a continuity of the self, what A. David Napier, in his Masks, Transformation, and Paradox, describes as common in Western notions of masking: "We are licensed, that is, to accept disguises as legitimate manifestations of personality while tacitly maintaining their fictitious character" (xxiv). Napier links masking with illusion and representation. Masking is like art; it functions similarly to fiction: "The recognition of illusion is the single prerequisite for understanding something that seems self-contradictory--in other words, for recognizing paradox, ... that something may appear to be something else" (3). As I hope to demonstrate, Coverdale's account is itself a paradox, purporting to be both real while fictional, to reveal through its methods of concealment. Masking is often figured in and by Coverdale's depiction of the women characters, Priscilla and Zenobia. Zenobia's masking is particularly paradoxical and more ambiguous than the other characters', perhaps accounting for the diversity of her critical reception. Zenobia's critical descriptions range from an organically realistic woman, to a vacuous allegory, to an embodiment of evil, to a stage director and performer. (2) Elizabeth Dill also notes Zenobia's widely varied and varying critical descriptions and argues convincingly that "because Zenobia is ... a radical fulfillment of the sentimental ideology at work in Blithedale, she makes the utopia of Blithedale possible to imagine, if not to realize," and that "a close look at Zenobia's suicide, in fact, reveals that she is perhaps one of the most bravely sentimental of all nineteenth-century American literary figures" (67). Dill resolves the opposing critical camps on Zenobia as either the "villain or victim," by revealing her as a sentimental character, and I would add to her reading my argument that Zenobia functions as a representation of a sentimental character, in part, as a result of the text's positioning Zenobia in an extremely tenuous binary against the more obviously sentimental Priscilla. This binary between the dark-haired temptress who, like the flower she wears, is "exotic," a "rare beauty" (3:15) against the mesmerist, the "pale" (3:50) and "shadowy snow-maiden" (3:33), who is perhaps more ephemeral than human, fails to sustain its apparent opposition consistently. …