Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Penguin Classics (1983), Paperback, 304 pages
Description
Classic Literature. Fiction. HTML: The residents of the Blithedale farm wish to make it into a modern Arcadia, free from the pollution of society. But they form such a varied, self-interested group, that their efforts are in vain. The misogynistic Hollingsworth wants to turn it into a sanctuary for reformed criminals; the exotic feminist Zenobia is helplessly attracted to Hollingsworth; and the narrator is an unreliable dandy with voyeuristic tendencies. Henry James called The Blithedale Romance the lightest and liveliest of Hawthorne's non-comedic novels..
User reviews
LibraryThing member kant1066
After reading “The Scarlet Letter” years ago in school, and now “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Blithedale Romance” in relatively close conjunction, there seems to be a common theme running throughout much of Hawthorne’s longer fiction: namely, the deep and abiding mistrust in
Coverdale, the naïve narrator in search of an agrarian source of truth, discovers Blithedale (the name itself should set off bells of suspicion), a community built around the ideals of Fourier, the utopian French social theorist. Fourier thought that life could be optimized through a kind of rationalistic social engineering, the basic living unit of which he called the “phalanstere.” The hilarious (hilarious in that subtle, dowdy, Puritan way that was uniquely Hawthorne’s) part is that, once everyone in Blithedale is introduced into the mix, tensions, different ideas, passions, and ideologies start to bubble to the surface showing just what a pipedream Fourier’s utopia really is. Hawthorne’s point seems to be that holding rationality primary over contingency and human emotion is shortsighted and silly. Not only is Blithedale a folly, but the very idea of a utopia is a sheer impossibility. I’m sure that Hawthorne would have us remember the clever lesson from Thomas More’s “Utopia” – that it means, quite literally, “no place.”
I’ll forego a lot of the plot details because I read this several months ago, and wouldn’t be able to do them justice without re-reading it. What I have unpacked here is just what jumped out at me the most. There is a strange woman named Zenobia who always wears a fresh flower in her hair, who turns out being the half-sister of a Blithedale foundling named Priscilla. The novel culminates in a set of philosophical disagreements between Coverdale and Hollingsworth, the ironically patriarchal figure whose presence hangs over Blithedale. I found the plot somewhat contrived and unrealistic, even for Hawthorne, but still very much worthwhile.
The action is based on Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm, a well-known utopian community in its own right, where he spent most of 1841, largely in an effort to save money for his marriage. He would marry Sophia Peabody (of the famous Peabody sisters) in July of the next year.
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ideas of utopia, progress or perfectibility, especially of the human kind. Hawthorne came from a long line of Puritans, one of whom even presided over some of the Salem witch trials. Now writing on the cusp of the Civil War, he feels the renewed need for the kind of pragmatic skepticism which, one generation later, an entire generation of American philosophers will call for.Coverdale, the naïve narrator in search of an agrarian source of truth, discovers Blithedale (the name itself should set off bells of suspicion), a community built around the ideals of Fourier, the utopian French social theorist. Fourier thought that life could be optimized through a kind of rationalistic social engineering, the basic living unit of which he called the “phalanstere.” The hilarious (hilarious in that subtle, dowdy, Puritan way that was uniquely Hawthorne’s) part is that, once everyone in Blithedale is introduced into the mix, tensions, different ideas, passions, and ideologies start to bubble to the surface showing just what a pipedream Fourier’s utopia really is. Hawthorne’s point seems to be that holding rationality primary over contingency and human emotion is shortsighted and silly. Not only is Blithedale a folly, but the very idea of a utopia is a sheer impossibility. I’m sure that Hawthorne would have us remember the clever lesson from Thomas More’s “Utopia” – that it means, quite literally, “no place.”
I’ll forego a lot of the plot details because I read this several months ago, and wouldn’t be able to do them justice without re-reading it. What I have unpacked here is just what jumped out at me the most. There is a strange woman named Zenobia who always wears a fresh flower in her hair, who turns out being the half-sister of a Blithedale foundling named Priscilla. The novel culminates in a set of philosophical disagreements between Coverdale and Hollingsworth, the ironically patriarchal figure whose presence hangs over Blithedale. I found the plot somewhat contrived and unrealistic, even for Hawthorne, but still very much worthwhile.
The action is based on Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm, a well-known utopian community in its own right, where he spent most of 1841, largely in an effort to save money for his marriage. He would marry Sophia Peabody (of the famous Peabody sisters) in July of the next year.
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LibraryThing member belgrade18
One of the worst novels I've read in a while- the plot is contrived, the prose is overdone, characters not as interesting as first appeared, etc. I expected the utopian community angle would make it intersting, but it doesn't play a very central part in the plot (or I didn't think so). At least it
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was short ... Show Less
LibraryThing member lucybrown
Before 200 channels of TV, radio, computers, and journalism, writers could write the way Hawthorne wrote. Readers had the patience to make their way through sentences so dense that you could chew them, description so vivid you could taste them. This is not to say that there hasn't been quantities
The Blithedale Romance to some extent follows the pattern of The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun; strong independent woman with a secret in her past and a shadowy maleficent man from whose hold she cannot break free. However, this novel of the founding of a Utopian community takes several new paths both in tone and narrative. As with all of Hawthorne's work there is a mysterious aspect to the narrative and the relationships of the characters, but in Blithedale the sense of other-worldliness is immediate and lasting. Another difference is that despite the tragic nature of the tale, the tone is more buoyant than in any other work that I have read by him. And, also not typical, with the use of the cynical Miles Coverdale who is willing to laugh at his own play at idealism as narrator, the book is often very funny. Thematically there is a great deal to chew on with the most important or interesting themes being, I suppose, the question of whether or not we can really better mankind as a whole and the paradox of the philanthropist, a man or woman who begins with a genuine concern for their cause but in the end becomes dehumanized by it.
Fanciful, funny, rich in sympathy, sobering and thought provoking... The Blithedale Romance deserves a wider readership than it has had. It is in not the great work that The Scarlet Letter is, but is very wise in its own way, a great tale, and probably more fun.
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of fine writing since the electronic age, but there sure hasn't been another Hawthorne or James, his literary heir. Some readers may be glad of that. Not me. I love the richness of 19th century prose. When I sit down with Melville, James, Trollope, G. Eliot or Hawthorne, I know I am going to be quite pleasurably lost in a sea of words. The Blithedale Romance to some extent follows the pattern of The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun; strong independent woman with a secret in her past and a shadowy maleficent man from whose hold she cannot break free. However, this novel of the founding of a Utopian community takes several new paths both in tone and narrative. As with all of Hawthorne's work there is a mysterious aspect to the narrative and the relationships of the characters, but in Blithedale the sense of other-worldliness is immediate and lasting. Another difference is that despite the tragic nature of the tale, the tone is more buoyant than in any other work that I have read by him. And, also not typical, with the use of the cynical Miles Coverdale who is willing to laugh at his own play at idealism as narrator, the book is often very funny. Thematically there is a great deal to chew on with the most important or interesting themes being, I suppose, the question of whether or not we can really better mankind as a whole and the paradox of the philanthropist, a man or woman who begins with a genuine concern for their cause but in the end becomes dehumanized by it.
Fanciful, funny, rich in sympathy, sobering and thought provoking... The Blithedale Romance deserves a wider readership than it has had. It is in not the great work that The Scarlet Letter is, but is very wise in its own way, a great tale, and probably more fun.
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LibraryThing member Stevil2001
When I read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in high school, I hated it. So when the chance came to reread it in ENG 141 last fall, I eagerly passed it up and read Washington Irving's The Sketch Book instead. But I also read three of Hawthorne's short stories ("The Birth-Mark", "Rappacini's
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Daughter", and "Young Goodman Brown" (a re-read)), and enjoyed them. A lot. So I decided to give another Hawthorne novel a go, and this was the one I picked. It was all right. Whatever the concentrated Hawthorne of the short stories did for me was not present here. I'm not turned off by his prose style to the extent I was in high school, but I do tend to glaze right over whole pages waiting for something to happen. It started promisingly enough, but halfway through I realized it just wasn't interesting me, as I didn't know exactly what was going on-- but didn't care either. So I finished it dutifully enough, but I already can scarcely tell you anything about but what happened in the book's second half. I'd still like to try some more of his short stories, though. (originally written December 2007) Show Less
LibraryThing member Jen7r
I loved this story. It has very interesting scenes of life at that time, both urban and rural. It shows the struggles one faces when trying to go one's own way. The women have excellent roles, and there is much honesty in the way the material is presented. This is some of Hawthorne's best work.
LibraryThing member Schmerguls
857 The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (read 4 June 1966) I did no post-reading note so all I can say is that I did not enjoy the book much, thinking it not very impressive. Wikipedia has an article on the book.
LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C
I was tempted to give this four stars. If three and a half feels ungenerous, it's because the prose so often gleams with wonderful imagery and ideas. Unless you are completely out of step with 19th century literature, I think it's impossible to read this and not see Hawthorne as a first rate
Blithedale is the name of a commune in which this story takes place. But it's only backdrop, not really the subject, and that disappointed me. Why bother having that as your setting if it's not tightly woven into your plot and theme? It's supposedly based on Hawthorne's own experiences on Brook Farm, a utopian commune. I've read that Hawthorne was suspicious of utopianism, and one would think that was fed by his own experiences, but I felt it got short shrift here. Yes, I can see aspects of the novel that are critical. Coverdale, the first person narrator, has all these puffed-up aspirations that seem to drain away once he meets anyone with dirt on his hands--let alone gets his own hands dirty. Hollingsworth is a portrait of the dangerous monomaniac you meet among a lot of those with utopian schemes. And then there's Zenobia. What a waste of a character. She's the patron of the place, a feminist before her time easily toppled over by love of a not very worthy man. In the end it's all a just a love triangle that I can't really see tying well into a theme about the impossibility of the perfectibility of man. (Of course the point might have been the imperfectness of women, and the impossibility of feminism, but you can't expect me to give Hawthorne points for that.) The ending to me seemed melodramatic and the last line made me roll my eyes.
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writer. Yet I can't think I'll read this again or hold this up as the epitome of his art, and I think that it doesn't quite all cohere for me.Blithedale is the name of a commune in which this story takes place. But it's only backdrop, not really the subject, and that disappointed me. Why bother having that as your setting if it's not tightly woven into your plot and theme? It's supposedly based on Hawthorne's own experiences on Brook Farm, a utopian commune. I've read that Hawthorne was suspicious of utopianism, and one would think that was fed by his own experiences, but I felt it got short shrift here. Yes, I can see aspects of the novel that are critical. Coverdale, the first person narrator, has all these puffed-up aspirations that seem to drain away once he meets anyone with dirt on his hands--let alone gets his own hands dirty. Hollingsworth is a portrait of the dangerous monomaniac you meet among a lot of those with utopian schemes. And then there's Zenobia. What a waste of a character. She's the patron of the place, a feminist before her time easily toppled over by love of a not very worthy man. In the end it's all a just a love triangle that I can't really see tying well into a theme about the impossibility of the perfectibility of man. (Of course the point might have been the imperfectness of women, and the impossibility of feminism, but you can't expect me to give Hawthorne points for that.) The ending to me seemed melodramatic and the last line made me roll my eyes.
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LibraryThing member lucybrown
Before 200 channels of TV, radio, computers, and journalism, writers could write the way Hawthorne wrote. Readers had the patience to make their way through sentences so dense that you could chew them, description so vivid you could taste them. This is not to say that there hasn't been quantities
The Blithedale Romance to some extent follows the pattern of The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun; strong independent woman with a secret in her past and a shadowy maleficent man from whose hold she cannot break free. However, this novel of the founding of a Utopian community takes several new paths both in tone and narrative. As with all of Hawthorne's work there is a mysterious aspect to the narrative and the relationships of the characters, but in Blithedale the sense of other-worldliness is immediate and lasting. Another difference is that despite the tragic nature of the tale, the tone is more buoyant than in any other work that I have read by him. And, also not typical, with the use of the cynical Miles Coverdale who is willing to laugh at his own play at idealism as narrator, the book is often very funny. Thematically there is a great deal to chew on with the most important or interesting themes being, I suppose, the question of whether or not we can really better mankind as a whole and the paradox of the philanthropist, a man or woman who begins with a genuine concern for their cause but in the end becomes dehumanized by it.
Fanciful, funny, rich in sympathy, sobering and thought provoking... The Blithedale Romance deserves a wider readership than it has had. It is in not the great work that The Scarlet Letter is, but is very wise in its own way, a great tale, and probably more fun.
Show More
of fine writing since the electronic age, but there sure hasn't been another Hawthorne or James, his literary heir. Some readers may be glad of that. Not me. I love the richness of 19th century prose. When I sit down with Melville, James, Trollope, G. Eliot or Hawthorne, I know I am going to be quite pleasurably lost in a sea of words. The Blithedale Romance to some extent follows the pattern of The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun; strong independent woman with a secret in her past and a shadowy maleficent man from whose hold she cannot break free. However, this novel of the founding of a Utopian community takes several new paths both in tone and narrative. As with all of Hawthorne's work there is a mysterious aspect to the narrative and the relationships of the characters, but in Blithedale the sense of other-worldliness is immediate and lasting. Another difference is that despite the tragic nature of the tale, the tone is more buoyant than in any other work that I have read by him. And, also not typical, with the use of the cynical Miles Coverdale who is willing to laugh at his own play at idealism as narrator, the book is often very funny. Thematically there is a great deal to chew on with the most important or interesting themes being, I suppose, the question of whether or not we can really better mankind as a whole and the paradox of the philanthropist, a man or woman who begins with a genuine concern for their cause but in the end becomes dehumanized by it.
Fanciful, funny, rich in sympathy, sobering and thought provoking... The Blithedale Romance deserves a wider readership than it has had. It is in not the great work that The Scarlet Letter is, but is very wise in its own way, a great tale, and probably more fun.
Show Less
LibraryThing member autumnesf
Story of a group of town men and women that decided to go work at a farm and live the simple life. Twist in the relationship of the leading women. Narrator seems to be a rather boring yet nosy poet. Surprise ending. Great last line.
LibraryThing member aulsmith
My favorite Hawthorne. A roman a clef about Brook Farm, the failed Transcendental communal experiment.
LibraryThing member engpunk77
Interesting....
These intellectuals found that theory doesn't always work out in practice. An increase of work lead to decreased intellectual growth and stimulation, and they couldn't handle it. If you can't sit around and discuss ideals, are they really in utopia at all?
These intellectuals found that theory doesn't always work out in practice. An increase of work lead to decreased intellectual growth and stimulation, and they couldn't handle it. If you can't sit around and discuss ideals, are they really in utopia at all?
LibraryThing member m.belljackson
This book was chosen while trying to complete a LT Challenge.
It was listed as a satire, yet there was barely enough information presented about the daily lives of the people who joined to form the experimental Blithedale community to satirize.
The plot ranged from faux mysteries to goofy, with good
"He had a good forehead, with a particularly large development just above the eyebrows; fine intellectual gifts, no doubt, which he had educated to this profitable end; being famous for nothing but gin-cocktails, and commanding a fair salary by his one accomplishment."
The physical beauty of the women was way over-emphasized and, what was revealed by their actions, might make one wonder if they were worthy of the equal rights pursued.
I felt no connection with any of the characters and only the slightest interest in solving the mystery
of The Veiled Lady, certainly a discordant plot entry.
It was listed as a satire, yet there was barely enough information presented about the daily lives of the people who joined to form the experimental Blithedale community to satirize.
The plot ranged from faux mysteries to goofy, with good
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venue and character physical descriptions interspersed: "He had a good forehead, with a particularly large development just above the eyebrows; fine intellectual gifts, no doubt, which he had educated to this profitable end; being famous for nothing but gin-cocktails, and commanding a fair salary by his one accomplishment."
The physical beauty of the women was way over-emphasized and, what was revealed by their actions, might make one wonder if they were worthy of the equal rights pursued.
I felt no connection with any of the characters and only the slightest interest in solving the mystery
of The Veiled Lady, certainly a discordant plot entry.
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LibraryThing member brakketh
Enjoyable romance with tragic elements.
LibraryThing member amerynth
So, "The Blithesdale Romance" certainly isn't Nathaniel Hawthorne's best work but I still found it interesting nonetheless. It had an odd way of getting at the story -- in a sort of meandering way, but I thought the overall story was interesting once the book finally got to it.
Our narrator Myles
Sometimes the plot gets lost a bit in the poetic ramblings about the trees or the walls (or whatever) but I liked it enough to continue on to see what would happen. The ending also surprised me, so bonus points for that, too.
Our narrator Myles
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Coverdale joins a communal farm named Blithesdale, which is populated by some quirky and interesting characters. There isn't really a ton of information about farm life, it's more about Coverdale's efforts to slowly uncover the lives of his fellow residents Zenobia and Priscilla.Sometimes the plot gets lost a bit in the poetic ramblings about the trees or the walls (or whatever) but I liked it enough to continue on to see what would happen. The ending also surprised me, so bonus points for that, too.
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Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1852
Physical description
304 p.; 7.84 inches
ISBN
0140390286 / 9780140390285