Book Review: The Blithedale Romance

[osprey_archer]

I finished Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, which disappointed me twice, although the first time was not its fault. I decided to read the book because histories of the utopian experiment at Brook Farm always mention it, and I was therefore hoping for lots of thinly veiled memoir about life at Brook Farm, but that’s not what the book is doing.

However, once I’d accepted that the book was not going to deliver on Brook Farm reminiscences, I settled pretty comfortably into enjoying what it was: a book with some nice nature descriptions and surprisingly interesting (and occasionally snarky) philosophizing about the utopian impulse and the hidden selfishness that sometimes lurks behind supposedly selfless plans for human reform.

I particularly enjoyed this bit of snark, in which the narrator snipes about his friend Hollingsworth, who has a monomaniacal devotion to a plan for “the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts”: “He ought to have commenced his investigation of the subject by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards,” the narrator complains, goaded past endurance by Hollingsworth’s insistence that the narrator ought devote himself forthwith to this vision of criminal reformation.

But then the book disappointed me again with the ending, in which Zenobia, the heroine of the book - actually one of the two heroines; there’s a love triangle, centered on Hollingsworth - anyway, Zenobia is the one who doesn’t win Hollingsworth’s heart, and she drowns herself in a pond because what else can you do with a New Woman character? For God’s sake, Zenobia writes articles! Articles in magazines! If you can’t settle this hoyden down with a good marriage, then clearly she’s got to kick the bucket somehow!

This is how New Women characters always end. Well, no, actually I’m sure someone could point out scattered examples who survive their books unmarried and unscathed. But most of the time they die of something.

And the worst part! The worst part! Is that up until the end, Hawthorne was actually doing a pretty good job with Zenobia: she’s a complicated, layered character, and if the narrator doesn’t always 100% approve of her, well, he also spends a lot of time griping about how much his buddy Hollingsworth sucks, and I never felt that he was being unfairly judgmental toward Zenobia. And then Hawthorne just kills her off. Would it kill you to send her on a trip to Europe or something, Hawthorne? I think that would have tied her away just fine.

It reminds me of those lists that have been going around, the companion lists about “All 156 Dead Lesbian and Bisexual Characters on TV, and How They Die” and “All 29 Lesbian and Bisexual Characters on TV Who Got Happy Endings.” The transgression of choice has changed, but the way that we as a culture deal with transgressive female characters has apparently changed not at all.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Hollingsworth and Chillingsworth? Hawthorne, you need to get a different name generator. This one turns them out too similar.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Now I'm wondering if there's some underlying commonality between the characters that explains the similarity between the name. Chillingsworth was the cuckolded husband in The Scarlet Letter, right? It's been a loooong time since I read it, but I remember that he struck me as being pretty much a straight up bad dude, unlike Hollingsworth who is a man of many virtues and moral strength which is tragically corrupted by his monomaniacal devotion to his ideal.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yep, Chillingsworth was the cuckolded husband. And I think the monomaniacal devotion to something may be the thing that links them. Chillingworth was set on destroying Dimmesdale (the lover) through gradually uncovering his guilt. I guess he didn't see it so much as vengeance but as pursuing what was bad and wrong, which, oh, by the way, was also the bad and wrong that HURT ME AND STOLE MY WIFE'S HEART (even though I was old and cold and probably couldn't have held onto it anyway).

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

That's why they both have that ironic "worth" in their names. They're both devoted to something theoretically worthy - Hollingsworth to his philanthropical project, Chillingsworth to truth and justice (at least in his own mind), but in the end it makes them both monstrous.