The Veil of Allegory in Hawthorne's the Blithedale

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 translation 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 corresponding 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 icicles instead of lines of fire".17 But icicles are exactly what this self-descnbed "frosty bachelor" produces; the highest literary praises he affords himself are terms like "small poet" and the detached role of a Greek chorus.18 After departing for the city, he reflects, "That cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people's passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart".19 Coverdale never produces the heroic epic poem of Blithedale he dreams of because the community itself falls apart, leaving him alone and disillusioned.20 His poetic collapse results also from a fundamental ambivalence toward Zenobia and Priscilla, the literary results of which are an unstable allegory and an unhappy ending. Like Hawthorne's Coverdale, Miles Coverdale the translator characterized his own work as flawed; he didn't know the languages and he undertook the project only reluctantly: Considering how excellent knowledge and learning an interpreter of scripture ought to have in the tongues, and pondering also mine own insufficiency therein, and how weak I am to perform the office of a translator, I was the more loath to meddle with this work.21 Coverdale lived through tumultuous times; once an Augustinian friar, he later became a devout Puritan, and went three times mto exile for various reasons.22 In Coverdale the biblical translator, Hawthorne found a figure aware of the necessity and pitfalls of translation, a Puritan keenly alert to distortions of the truth; Coverdale introduces the Apocrypha as follows: "These and many other dark places of scripture have been sore stirred and mixed with blind and covetous opinions of men, which have cast such a mist afore the eyes of the simple".23 48 ALLEGORY IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE 4 FOURIER AND PARADISE The novel's most sustained biblical conceit is the description of Blithedale as Eden. Coverdale depicts Fourier's Utopian socialist vision as a worthwhile failure in the pattern of the Fall from Eden; Hollingsworth, on the other hand, judges it harshly: "There is not human nature in it!"24 Blithedale also signifies the American Eden of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; Charles

Fourier's idea of the phalanstery, a precisely-ordered community, is only a Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 contemporary version of the same impulses that drove New England Puritanism.25 The founding document for Brook Farm, written before the community embraced Founerism, is a curious blend of communitananism and Christianity: just after proclaiming the goal of "LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL", the text describes the community as a version of Christ's kingdom.26 Like allegory itself, die utopianism of Bhthedale supports the view that history is constituted by successive transformations of religious culture.27 In The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale reduces Bhthedale to its Puritan roots with dread and foreboding; Zenobia lightheartedly mocks the Edemc parallel; Hollingsworth denounces Fourier as a sinner: " And as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of Gehenna, where, as I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this moment!' '>2S By allegorizing Brook Farm, Hawthorne expresses the same land of ambivalence toward American utopianism that Sacvan Bercovitch and Lauren Berlant see in The Scarlet Letter.™ But The Blithedale Romance lacks the moral "centre" (see p. 44) of national history found in The Scarlet Letter. Because Bhthedale is a local experiment rather than a national vision, it is at once less consequential and more extravagendy Utopian than Hester Prynne's Puritan society. If The Scarlet Letter operates on a set of dichotomies, The Blithedale Romance moves about a consellation of competing worldviews, Utopias, and interpretative frameworks. The Scarlet Letter is an allegory, but The Blithedale Romance is about allegory. Fourier's Utopian system is based on the physical principle of attraction and a theory of die passions.30 He arranges passions into three groups: the sensitive passions, which correspond to the five senses, the affective passions (friendship, love, ambition, and paternity/consanguinity), and the distributive passions, which "possess die property of forming and directing the series of groups, the mainspring of social harmony".31 The distributive passions—the cabahst, the alternating or butterfly, and the composite—underlie the socialist community of the phalanstery and are viewed as vices by Fourier's enemies, the philosophers. Fourier writes, "The cabalist is the passion diat, like love, has die property of confounding ranks, drawing superiors and inferiors closer to each odier".32 BRIAN M. BRITT 49 The cabalist passion most closely describes the features of Blithedale that Coverdale hates:

Compare the tone of a formal social gathering, its moral, stilted, languishing jargon, with the tone of these same people united in a cabal- they will appear transformed to you; you will admire their terseness, their animation, the quick play of ideas, the alertness of action, of decision; in a work, the rapidity of the

spiritual or material motion. ... The cabalist is a favorite passion of women; Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 they are excessively fond of intrigue, the rivalries and all the greater and lesser flights of a cabal.33

Hawthorne, who read Fourier while preparing the novel, may have had this passion in mind when he described the atmosphere at Bhthedale:

While inclining us to the soft affections of the Golden Age, it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent Accordingly, the tender passion was very nfe among us, in various degrees of mildness or virulence, but mosdy passing away with the state of things diat had given it ongui.34

The cabalist passion creates an atmosphere where every combination of the characters has romantic potential: Zenobia and Coverdale, Pnscilla and Coverdale, Holhngsworth and Zenobia, and so on. But these attachments turn out to be unhappy: Hollingsworth's rejection of Zenobia leads her to suicide. Coverdale muses on this cabal when he returns to Bhthedale late in the novel: "It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered to myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the errors, and the misfortunes, of individuals who stood within a circle of their own".35 Holhngsworth and Coverdale, and later Holhngsworth and Priscilla, follow the pattern of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth in 77JC Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's American Notebooks has the following note: "Sketch of a person, who, by strength of character, or assistant circumstances, has reduced another to absolute slavery and dependence on him. Then show, that the person who appeared to be the master, must inevitably be at least as much a slave, if not more, than the other. All slavery is reciprocal, on the supposition most favorable to the rulers".36 The pathetic state of Hollingsworth and Priscilla at the end of the romance plays out what would have happened if Coverdale had succumbed to Holhngsworth's friendship. Here, too, Priscilla provides Coverdale with a veil of protection after die Fall.

5 BIBLICAL ALLUSIONS AND GENDER If Blithedale is Eden, then its Eve is Zenobia, the independent and beautiful leader who attracts Coverdale's fascination and hostility. The fanciful name, 50 ALLEGORY IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE adopted by the character to mark a new identity, alludes to the third century queen of Palmyra who defied Roman rule.37 Zenobia was the subject of several historical and literary works in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and William Ware's 1837 romance, Zenobia, or the Fall of Palmyra, drew critical praise from Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson.38 But one pseudonym leads to another when Zenobia lightheartedly assumes the role of Eve: "No, no, Mr. Coverdale, the only flower hereabouts is the one in my hair, which I got out of a green-house, this morning. As for the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 garb of Eden ... I shall not assume it till after May-day!"39 Coverdale adds that these words "irresistably brought up a picture of that fine, perfectly developed figure, in Eve's earliest garment".40 Zenobia thus combines the qualities of a warrior queen (later alluded to in the figure of Jael) with those of the sinful first mother. The flower that appears in her hair every day comes not from the field but a greenhouse, and in the city it is replaced by floral jewels, "imparting the last touch that transformed Zenobia into a work of art".41 The flower is a symbol of natural beauty but also a dangerous talis- man;42 like Hester Prynne's scarlet A, the flower identifies Zenobia variously, even as an emblem of shame, because it also represents her half-sister Priscilla, the object of Coverdale's pity and love: "Priscilla—poor, pallid flower!—was either snatched from Zenobia's hand, or flung wilfully away!"43 In fact, Pnscilla's mystique drives the plot. Coverdale wonders if the delicate silk purses she knits "were not a symbol of Priscilla's own mystery".44 Some critics have suggested that the purses and the night cap she makes for Coverdale represent a sexual past that may have included Coverdale; Hawthorne's deep suspicion of mesmerism as a kind of sexual violation supports this view.45 Still, she is held up as a paradigm of spiritual female purity, while Zenobia's appeal is strictly earthly. Through a plot reversal as obvious as a morality play, Zenobia is led to suicide and Priscilla is rescued and rewarded.46 But Coverdale sometimes gets the identities of the two women confused. When Priscilla brings Coverdale a letter from Margaret Fuller, he remarks that she resembles Fuller; Priscilla reacts "petulantly" with the question, "How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady, merely by holding her letter in my hand?" and doesn't return to see Coverdale in his sick-bed again.47 The resemblance indicates confusion of identities because Zenobia is clearly the Fuller figure; Coverdale also mistakes Zenobia for Priscilla, calling her at one point an enchantress.48 The interchangeability of Zenobia and Priscilla suggests that Coverdale loves them both, or even that he has transferred his dangerous love of Zenobia to a safer preoccupation with the gentle Priscilla. With Zenobia as Eve and Bhthedale as "Paradise anew", Coverdale himself BRIAN M BRITT 51 becomes Adam; Hawthorne depicts all these elements in a morally ambiguous light. He writes of his return to Blithedale:

The curse of Adam's posterity—and, curse or blessing be it, it gives substance to the life around us—had first come upon me there. In the sweat of my brow, I had there earned bread and eaten it, and so established my claim to be on earth, and my fellowship with all the sons of labor. . . The red clay, of which my frame was moulded, seemed nearer akin to those crumbling furrows than Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 to any other portion of the world's dust. There was my home; and there might be my grave.49

Coverdale nostalgically laments the lost Paradise after the Fall; he misses the failed experiment with the same "home-sickness" and "shapeless regrets" he feels after retreating to the city.50 The loss is also literary: just as Adam ceases to name things after the Fall, Coverdale no longer writes poetry; he translates and allegorizes instead. But Coverdale experiences darker fears than the Fall at Blithedale, which he expresses through the biblical figures of Sisera and Job:

During the greater part of it [the first night at Blithedale], I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea remains in the mind, like the nail m Sisera's brain, while innumerable other ideas go and come, and flutter to-and-fro, combining constant transition with intolerable sameness. Had I made a record of that night's half-waking dreams, it is my belief that it would have anticipated several of the chief incidents of this narrative, including a dim shadow of its catastrophe.51

The extraordinary comparison of the "half-waking dreams" to the nail in Sisera's brain evokes the scene in Judges 4 where the woman Jael kills the Canaanite general Sisera by nailing his head to the ground with a tent peg after lulling him to sleep. The image is so vivid and inappropriate as a description of fitful sleep that it suggests that Coverdale's "fixed idea" might be a fear that Zenobia as Jael, perhaps supported by Priscilla as Deborah the prophetess, will destroy him.52 Even more remarkable is Coverdale's retro- spective comment that these half-dreams might have predicted the outcome of the story in which Zenobia, not Coverdale, is destroyed. The prophetic dreams join Coverdale's visit to the Veiled Lady on the list of foreboding but misinterpreted signs of the story's outcome. Gripped by paranoid fascination with Zenobia and Priscilla, Coverdale transforms a dream that predicts Zenobia's death into a fantasy of his own death at her hand. This twist represents Coverdale's most serious downfall as a translator/allegorist and as a moral character. The next day, Coverdale has become ill and reports, "As for me, I lay abed, and if I said my prayers, it was backward, cursing my day as bitterly as 52 ALLEGORY IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE patient Job himself".53 Within only twenty-four hours of his arrival at Blithedale, Coverdale has fallen from Paradise to paranoia and the bitter suffering of Job. The notion of saying his prayers backward has a distinctly demonic ring, and the comparison of a head cold with Job's suffering illustrates Coverdale's tendency to distort truth through allegory. Yet the self-image as Job becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, for from this point onward, Coverdale remains detached from the other members of his group, a loner like Job, surrounded but not comforted by his friends. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021

6 CONCLUSION: ALLEGORICAL BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT Coverdale's allegoncal narration contains serious distortions, particularly with respect to Zenobia and Priscilla. But like translation, narration is a necessary human activity, and one that is necessarily flawed. Coverdale's storytelling mixes blindness and insight; while he nghtly uncovers the religious roots of Utopian socialism, Coverdale distorts Zenobia and Priscilla into fetishized projections.54 (The Veiled Lady, even by allegorical standards, would be idolatrous and anti-Christian because she is occult/magical.) The blindness of Coverdale's allegory lends insight into the biblical dimensions of Utopian socialism and feminism. Conversely, these progressive views illuminate the simplistic inaccuracy of Coverdale's biblical allegory, especially with respect to women. While Coverdale's attitudes toward Zenobia and Priscilla are blinded by his puritanical leanings, his actions are less destructive than those of the sham Christian HoUingsworth and the sham occultist Westervelt, though perhaps these villains function as surrogates for Coverdale's own passion and hostility toward the women. Coverdale commits sins of omission, including the abandonment of Blithedale and his friend Zenobia. But Coverdale's failings as a narrator are more senous; the gloss of biblical judgment he assigns to Zenobia and Priscilla from the Preface onward reflects a repudiation of women. Like Parson Hooper in "The Minister's Black Veil", Coverdale hides himself behind the allegory of the Veiled Lady in order figuratively to kill off the strong woman, Zenobia, "the high-spirited Woman, bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex".55 At the same time, Coverdale experiences Zenobia's suffering and death as a personal loss analogous to his own situation. After the masque scene where Zenobia denounces Hollingsworth, Coverdale stays behind to comfort her: "Was it wrong, therefore, if I felt myself consecrated to the priesthood, by sympathy like this, and called upon to minister to this woman's affliction, so far as mortal could?"56 Zenobia asks Coverdale to render her "tragedy" into a ballad with the following moral: "The whole universe" makes "common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten BRIAN M BRITT 53 track".57 On this point Coverdale and Zenobia agree, though for different reasons. Zenobia voices the suicidal resignation of a tragic victim, while Coverdale, who asks whether this is "too stern a moral", pities her as a fellow sinner and loser in love; as he sees it, both have lost to Priscilla. But if Priscdla is only a shadowy cipher, the projection of a feminine stereotype, then Coverdale has used allegory to conceal his ambivalence toward Zenobia. He and Zenobia are crushed under the moralistic weight of allegoncal tradition. Coverdale's view of women, in which weak, pitiful creatures gain die Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 upper hand and strong women get their come-uppance, reflects the view of conventional Christian allegory; what makes The BUthedale Romance atypical is the use of allegory in a contemporary world where the voices of feminism, socialism, philanthropy, and the occult speak and clash in a Bakhtinian polyphony. The blindness of rendering BUthedale through an allegoncal perspective yields insight into the community members, not through heavy- handed symbolism and judgmental narration, but by showing how biblical and allegoncal categories shape culture in ways that are well-known and benevolent as well as hidden and dangerous.58 Coverdale's failure is die failure of allegory itself, a "faint and not very faithful shadowing" of a pluralistic world.59 Still, the attempt leaves some traces of reconciliation: Coverdale avoids the stern puritanism of Hollingsworth and the exploitative pseudo-mysticism of Westervelt; he illuminates die biblical roots of Utopian socialism and feminism, and while he judges them both negatively, at least he feels enough compassion for both diat they affect him permanendy. The BUthedale Romance is an mcomplete translation-m-progress whose author has become stuck in what Benjamin calls die antinomies of allegory: our narratives and visions inevitably follow the biblical tradition, but they are nevertheless not the Bible.60 Like Coverdale the translator, who sought to uncover die "dark places of scripture" witiiout knowing the biblical tongues, Coverdale the narrator tries to uncover the dark secrets of his companions without knowing their circumstances or even his own motivations. His artistic and moral failure leads him to create a heavy-handed allegory and to hide behind die cipher of the Veiled Lady, but not without illuminating translation and allegory in die process.

Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia, U.S.A.

REFERENCES

1 See Joan Magretta, "The Coverdale Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 2 (1972) 73; Translation. BUthedale and the Bible" Charles Swann, "The Blithedale Romance— Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 4 (1974) 242; Translation and Transformation: Mime and Roy R. Male, Jr "Hawthorne's Fancy, or Mimesis", Journal of American Studies 18 the Medium of The Blithedale Romance", (1984) 237; and Joan D. Window, "New 54 ALLEGORY IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE Light on Hawthorne's Miles Coverdale", 6 Hawthorne, The American Notebooks (New Journal of Narrative Technique 7 (1977) Haven Yale University Press), p. 09. 189—99. Lauren Berlant also notes the fact, 7 Hawthorne, letter to Horatio Bndge, but her analysis focuses on Utopian and 7/22/51, quoted in Turner, Nathanael sexual fantasy: "Fantasies of Utopia in The Hawthorne: A Biography, p. 236. Blithedale Romance", American Literary 8 Charles Feidelson, Jr. characterizes the History (1989) 30—62. I wish to thank Stan novel as a conflict between Hawthorne the Blair and Amy Hollywood for their com- symbolist and Hawthorne the allegonst ments on drafts of this essay "The symbolistic and the allegoncal pat- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 2 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The BUthedale terns in Hawthorne's books reach quite Romance (New York: Penguin, 1985), p 2. different conclusions, or, radier, the sym- 3 The short stones of Twice-Told Tales, which bolism leads to an inconclusive luxuriance Hawthorne revised at Brook Farm, share of meaning, while allegory imposes the pat such narrative techniques as first-person moral and the simplified character", narrator/characters with The Blithedale Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago Romance. See Lloyd Morns, The Rebellious University of Chicago Press, 1959) 15 As useful as this analysis is, one could also Puritan (New York- Harcourt, Brace and explain the novel's instability without Company, 1927), p 145. 4 indicting Hawthorne as a failure within Arhn Turner, Nathanael Hawthorne. A allegory that comes from die complexity Biography (New York' Oxford University of the expenence, the ambivalence of die Press, 1980), pp. 240-41; although Eliot narrator, and the nature of allegory itself admired the fiction, she felt the account of 9 Fuller was unfairly negative Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", trans. Harry Zohn, in 5 See also the 1845 journal entry that gives a Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New detailed account of the search for a York. Schocken, 1985), pp. 254, 257. drowned girl, "a girl of education and 10 Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 243 refinement, but depressed and miserable for 11 Ibid., pp 199, 245-46 want of sympadiy", Hawthorne, The 12 Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric ofBhndness", American Notebooks, (New Haven: Yale in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis Univ University Press, 1932), p 112 One can of Minnesota Press, 1983) only speculate on the precise links between 13 In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Zenobia and Fuller, but the parallels, Benjamin declares diat "Allegones become including Hawthorne's hostility toward dated, because it is part of their nature to both, are clear from his 1858 Italian note- shock If the object becomes allegoncal books: "She was a great humbug; of course under the gaze of melancholy, if melan- with much talent, and much moral reality, choly causes life to flow out of it and it or else she could not have been so great a remains behind dead, but eternally secure, humbug. .. and as tragic as her catastrophe then it is exposed to die allegonst, it is was, Providence was, after all, kind m put- unconditionally in his power", (The Origin ting her, and her clownish husband, and of German Tragic Drama, trans. John dieir child, on board diat fated ship", The Osborne [London: NLB, 1977], French and Italian Notebooks, ed Thomas pp 183-84). Woodson, in The Centenary Edition of the 14 Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 6. Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 14 15 Nina Baym, "77K Blithedale Romance. A (Columbus Ohio State University Press, Radical Reading", in The Blithedale 1980), p 156. For an account of Fuller's Romance, Seymour Gross and Rosalie death, which was seen by some as being Murchy, eds. (New York- Norton,' 1978), semi-suicidal, see Kadianne Anthony, p. 362. Margaret Fuller A Psychological Biography16 The goal of translation, according to (New York Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, Benjamin, is not to communicate but 1920), p. 205. rather to capture a work's "mode of sig- BRIAN M BRJTT 55 rufication" and the reciprocity among lan- Baudelaire, Founer was caught up in the guages Benjamin, "The Task of the wonder and excitement of modern urban Translator", pp. 78, 72. hie, and as Benjamin points out, Founer 17 Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 224 even bases the architecture of the phalan- 18 Ibid, pp 9, 181, 97. stery on the new gas-lit passages of Paris. 19 Ibid., p. 154. Founer, Selections From the Works of Charles 20 Ibid., p 129. Founer, ed Charles Gide, trans. Julia 21 Miles Coverdale, "Translator's Prologue to Franklin (New York. Gordon Press, 1972), The Bible", History of the Bible in English, pp. 146—47, Benjamin, Baudelaire, p 160. F. F. Bruce (New York Oxford University Hawthorne's own fascination with early Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 Press, 1978), p 57 modem life can be seen m the description 22 Ibid, pp. 53-54 of Boston in The Blithedale Romance, in the 23 Ibid, p. 60 On the Apocrypha, Swann railway tnp of The House of Seven Gables, notes "I think it is more than pedantry to and in the astonishing modem allegorical note both that Coverdale was the first satire, "The Celestial Rail-road". See Dana Englishman to include the Apocryphal Brand, The Spectator and the City m books in his translation—and that his is not Nineteenth-Century American Literature the Authorized Version", "The Blithedale (Cambndge: Cambndge University Press, Romance—Translation and Transformation: 1991), pp 122-55. Mime and Mimesis", p. 240 Margaret Fuller was also aware of the 24 Coverdale also compares Bhthedale to the religious dimension and shortcomings of Garden of Eden and describes its inhabitants Founer's thought as pilgrims The Bhthedale Romance, pp. 17, 117, 132 "As aposde of the new order, of the social 25 Brook Farm was one of at least 28 Founenst febnc that is to rise from love, and super- communities in the United States during sede the old that was based on strife, the 1840's. See Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Charles Founer comes next [after Utopias (Philadelphia: University of Swedenborg] .. The mind of Founer, Pennsylvania Press, 1950), pp. 280—82 though grand and clear, was, in some 26 Elizabeth P Peabody, "Plan of the West respects, superficial . . Yet he, too, was a Roxbury Community", in Autobiography of seer of the divine order, in its musical Brook Farm, ed. Henry H Sams expression, if not m its poetic soul." (Englewood Chfls, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth 1958), p. 63. Century, m The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. 27 Walter Benjamin places Founer among the Jeffrey Steele (New Brunswick: Rutgers modems who reiterate old patterns. "These University Press, 1092), p 314. tendencies turn the fantasy, which gams its initial stimulus from the new, back upon 28 Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 54. the pnmal past. In the dream in which 29 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet every epoch sees in images the epoch Letter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins which is to succeed it, the latter appears University Press, 1991), 71-72; Lauren coupled with elements of prehistory—that Berlant, 77K Anatomy of National Fantasy is to say of a classless society" Walter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire A Lyric Poet 1991), PP- 33-34- in the Era of High Capitalism, trans Harry 30 "The learned world is wholly imbued with Zohn (London: Verso, 1976), p. 159. In his a doctrine termed MORALITY, which is lengthy manuscript of notes on Founer, a mortal enemy of passional attraction", Benjamin wntes that Founer could only Founer, Selections from the Works of arise in the nineteenth century. Benjamin, Founer, p. 55. Gesammelte Schnften, Rolf Tiedemann and 31 Ibid, p 57 H Schweppenhauser, eds (Frankfurt: 32 The composite is die pleasure and love of Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. 5: p. 785. Like the senses and the soul, and the alternating ALLEGORY IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE or butterfly passion is the alternation through his art, for the wicked Zenobia between the cabahst and the composite, was by no means lacking in attractiveness ibid., p. 57. and charm " (Margaret Fuller: A Psychological 33 Ibid., pp. 57-58. Biography, pp 92~93)- 34 Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 72 47 35 Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 52. fttf., p. 206. 48 36 Ibid , p. 45. Hawthorne, T7ie American Notebooks, 49 p 107 See 77ie Blithedale Romance, pp. 41, Ibid , 206. See R. W B. Lewis' classic treat- ment of the Adam motif in The American 70ff, 133-

Adam (Chicago. University of Chicago Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 37 See John C. Hirsh, "Zenobia as Queen- Press, 1959). The Background Sources to Hawthorne's 50 'The Blithedale Romance'", in 77K Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 154 51 Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1 (1971) Ibid, p. 38. 52 pp. 182-90.. The same allusion appears in a sketch 38 drawn by the artist Minam m The Marble Ibid , p 183. Faun: Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p 17 40 Ibid. "It was dashed off with remarkable power, 41 Ibid., p. 164. and showed a touch or two that were actu- 42 aid , p. 45 ally life-like and death-like, as if Minam 43 Ibid , p 193. had been standing by when Jael gave the 44 Ibid, p 35- first stroke of her murderous hammer, or 45 Barbara F. Lefcowitz and Allan B as if she herself were Jael, and felt irresistibly Lefcowitz, "Some Rents in the Veil: New impelled to make her bloody confession in Light on Pnscilla and Zenobia", in this guise Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New Her first conception of the stem Jewess York Norton, 1978), pp. 341-50. For had evidently been that of perfect woman- Hawthorne's fears about mesmerism, see hood, a lovely form ... but, dissatisfied James R. Mellow, Nathanael Hawthorne in either with her own work or the temble His Times (Boston Houghton Mifflin, story itself, Minam had added a certain 1980), p 190. wayward quirk of her pencil, which at once 46 If in fact Zenobia represents Margaret converted the heroine into a vulgar mur- Fuller, then this outcome could be inter- deress. It was evident that a Jael like this preted as a fictional act of hostility toward would be sure to search Sisera's pockets as her. See note 6, above. Katharine Anthony, soon as the breath was out of his body." in her 1920 psychological biography of (The Marble Faun [New York: Thomas Y Fuller, states the case unequivocally: Crowell], p. 36).

"Like many gentle, suffering souls he was Minam, who has made several such capable of the deepest mahce; and his life- sketches, including one of Judith, looks long preoccupation with the concepts of Jewish herself and later is revealed to be sin and guilt—the central theme of all hu partly Jewish. The narrator's ambivalence novels,—made a healthy oudook on the toward Miriam's womanhood blurs into facts of life increasingly impossible His similar feelings about her Jewishness. (See immoderate dislike of Margaret is only the desenpuon of the Jewish ghetto in comprehensible as a symptom of his hidden Rome, "where thousands of Jews are misery, a cover for his fascinated interest in crowded within a narrow compass, and lead 'a Bacchante type . No doubt he received a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, the same sort of emotional satisfaction from resembling that of maggots when they vilhfying her that his near ancestor had over-populate a decaying cheese", p. 145). received from whipping a witch through The Jael/Judith story constitutes a literary the streets of Salem. This complexity of motif that combines Hawthorne's ambival- feeling expressed itself more freely and truly ence toward women and Jews. BRIAN M BRITT 57 53 Hawthorne, The Blithedalc Romance, p. 40. insight." (Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of M Speaking of critics, Paul de Man writes, Blindness", p. 106). "Their [critics'] critical stance . is defeated 55 Hawthorne, The BHthedale Romance, p 2. by their own critical results A penetrating 56 Ibid., p. 222. but difficult insight into the nature of literary 57 Ibid , p. 224. language ensues. It seems, however, that this 58 See Dennis Grunes, "Allegory Versus insight could only be gained because the Allegory in Hawthorne", American critics see in the gnp of this peculiar blindness: Transcendental Quarterly 32, Part 1 (1976) their language could grope toward a certain pp. 14-19 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/10/1/44/1227283 by guest on 01 October 2021 degree of insight only because their method 59 Ibid., p 1. remained oblivious to the perception of this 60 Ibid., pp 174-75-