The Veil of Allegory in Hawthorne's the Blithedale
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Literature & TTteology, Vot 10 No l, March 1996 THE VEIL OF ALLEGORY IN HAWTHORNE'S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 Brian M. Britt Abstract When Nathaniel Hawthorne fictionalized his Brook Farm experience in The Blithedak Romance, he named his narrator and central character Miles Coverdale, the first person to publish a complete English translation of the Bible. Hawthorne's novel and journals say almost nothing about translation, but they are filled with allegory and symbolism. This essay examines The BHthedale Romance m the light of Walter Benjamin's ideas of translation and allegory. Compering ideas of the world—socialism, feminism, occultism, aestheticism, and Puritanism—collide in the novel. The result is a frag- mented narrative that distorts what it depicts—particularly the women characters—and a metanarrative on the limitations of storytelling as translation. 1 INTRODUCTION SOME CRITICS of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The BHthedale Romance have noted the fact that its narrator, Miles Coverdale, has the same name as the first person to publish a complete English translation of the Bible, but none has analyzed the novel's explicit biblical content and its allegorical function.1 The name alludes to the translator and also resonates with the novel's allegorical elements, including the setting, Blithedale, and the mysterious figure of the Veiled Lady. This essay suggests that the novel's metaphors of biblical transla- tion and allegory he at the centre of Coverdale's strange and unstable narrative. In the novel, biblical references express Coverdale's preoccupation with sin and his related ambivalence toward women: Coverdale personifies Adam (but also Sisera and Job) and Zenobia is Eve. He translates his personal experiences at Blithedale into allegorical romance, an imaginary world "with an atmosphere of strange enchantment".2 But instead of creating a consistent symbolic and moral universe, Coverdale creates an unstable world of disen- chantment; his failure to create an imaginative "Faery Land" is matched in the story by the failure of the "new philosophy" of the "Blithedale enterprise". O Oxford Univenity Press 1996 BRIAN M. BRITT 45 The Blithedak Romance is the most autobiographical and perhaps the most fanciful novel in Hawthorne's corpus. The poet Miles Coverdale, who joins the Utopian socialist community of Blithedale, parallels Hawthorne, who briefly stayed at Brook Farm for several months in 1842. Coverdale is also the only first person narrator/character in a Hawthorne novel.3 The character Zenobia is obviously based on Margaret Fuller, the well-known feminist intellectual and acquaintance of Hawthorne.4 In fact, the romance that cul- minates in Zenobia's suicidal drowning was written in the wake of Fuller's Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 1850 drowning at sea.5 The Blithedale Romance portrays various characters and worldviews—the socialism of Charles Fourier, the feminism of Zenobia, the philanthropic reform of Hollingsworth, and the seductive occultism of Westervelt—as secularized versions of biblical tales of sin and virtue. 2 ALLEGORICAL TRANSLATION Coverdale tries to translate his experience into allegory. Hawthorne wrote in his 1842 journal: "To allegorize life with a masquerade, and represent mankind generally as masquers. Here and there, a natural face may appear".6 Years later, Hawthorne indicates m a letter his intention to "put an extra touch of the devil" into the novel.7 But while Coverdale's allegory may at first appear well-ordered and obvious, it contains fundamental instabilities; the masque scene where Zenobia stands for a mock witch-trial blends fiction with Hawthorne's own experience in a way that makes its meaning unclear. Unlike the corresponding scenes of public judgment m The Scarlet Letter, Zenobia's trial is half-real, half-playacting, and related by a partially-informed spectator. The result is a fiction with competing interpretive schemas in which Coverdale's own system of veils and heavy-handed symbols collapses to reveal an incomplete resolution of conflicts.8 Like most of Hawthorne's fiction, the romance reverberates with a sacred past just beneath a secular present: the community members are pilgrims who assemble m the woods for a Sunday sermon at Eliot's Pulpit; Hollingsworth, the monomaniacal Christian philanthropist who rails against the devil, is himself a devil (as is the mesmerist Westervelt); Pnscilla (like her father Moodie) is a ghost or spirit and also the Veiled Lady; Zenobia is a fallen Eve persecuted as a witch who considers becoming a nun. To follow Coverdale's perspective is to see the characters not as proponents of the progressive new ideas of socialism, feminism, and criminal reform, but as actors in an allegorical dream-play between God and the devil. Nothing here is what it seems; in fact, almost everything is the opposite of what it seems. Successful allegory may, however, be just as rare as successful biblical translation. To Walter Benjamin, translation and allegory are necessary but flawed attempts to recover the pure language of naming. After the Fall, literary history from the Bible onward represents a series of efforts to return 46 ALLEGORY IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE to the original language of Adam, the first philosopher. But the contemporary translator/philosopher, like the angel in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History", has only a "weak messianic power" with which to counteract history, "which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet".9 Allegory attempts to reconstitute pure language out of profane language. But allegory has the double effect of sanctifying language and yet profaning it by compelling words to mean a variety of things. Allegory is therefore a necessary failure, a melancholy gesture toward recovery rendered Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 impossible by the state of post-lapsarian language. Coverdale's failure at allegory therefore comments on allegory m general. When, in the penultimate chapter, he announces the moral that philanthropy ruins the heart, complete with a reference to Bunyan, Coverdale offers no counterexample of virtue rewarded.10 His own heart, it seems, is even heavier than Hollingsworth's, who has the advantage of life with Priscilla. Coverdale leads a colourless, empty life in an "evil age", and his narrative tells the story of an unsuccessful writer.11 The Blithedale Romance displays the limitations and strengths of allegory, at least for describing the nineteenth-century social universe. Coverdale's insight into his comrades' foibles is matched by corres- ponding blindness toward his moralistic tale and himself.12 Coverdale's failure to translate his experience into a stable allegory illuminates allegory itself, the melancholy genre that Benjamin shows is doomed to failure.13 3 ALLEGORICAL NARRATION The Veiled Lady stands at the centre of The Blithedale Romance as a figure of mystery or confusion rather than understanding, reflecting Coverdale's struggle to render Bhthedale into meaningful symbolic terms. Priscilla (as the Veiled Lady) predicts the story's outcome in the first scene, where Coverdale consults her on the projected outcome of the Blithedale adventure: "The response, by-the-by, was of the true Sibylline stamp, nonsensical in its first aspect, yet, on closer study, unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has certainly accorded with the event".14 Coverdale has difficulty translating this prophetic cipher and the figure behind it. This may explain why Priscilla is one of the novel's sketchiest characters; one critic describes her as a "void for the poet to decorate".15 Coverdale's narrative draws together several competing voices.16 From Hollingsworth's moralistic philanthropy to Zenobia's feminism, these voices are subordinated to the Bible and biblical Christianity. Still, the translation remains incomplete; traces of the original modes or "languages" remain. Hence, the allegory fails to provide an overall moral explanation of the events, because of the diversity of voices and Coverdale's veiled motives. Coverdale presents an unstable mixture of competing interpretive frameworks, the most BRIAN M BRITT 47 truthful and mysterious of which is Priscilla's, and behind her veil stands Coverdale himself in the act of allegorizing. Even the plot is unclear, because Coverdale reports the action at a voyeur's distance, from a "hermitage" m the woods and from a single-room boarding- house across from the city house of Zenobia. The confusion and detachment of Coverdale's narrative matches other failures in the romance: the socialist "experiment" at Blithedale fails, the philanthropic scheme of Hollingsworth fails, the feminism of Zenobia, by her own last words and suicide, fails, and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 even the poetic work of Coverdale fails; his exhaustion and melancholy induce artistic paralysis. In The Blithedale Romance, social and literary failures constitute a metanarrative on the necessity and impossibility of translation and allegory. Zenobia twice refers to Coverdale as a capable poet and begs him to "write this ballad, and put your soul's ache into it, and turn your sympathy to good account, as other poets do, and as poets must, unless they choose to give us glittering