Hawthorne the Blithedale Romance Essay

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Maria Susanna Cummins’ The Lamplighter are vastly different books. While originally published within two years of each other, both authors approached their writing through distinctive practices. Hawthorne failed to show development in the majority of his characters in his romance, while Cummins’ sentimental novel is heavily loaded with positive character growth. After reading The Blithedale Romance and The Lamplighter, one of the main differences noted

Nathaniel Hawthorne used the term "romance" to refer to his longer fictions the year before writing The Blithedale Romance, he chose to define the term for the benefit of his readers: When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) illustrates the Nineteenth Century’s industrial revolution that spurred social discourse and movements to erect utopian societies. The book chronicles a Mr. Cloverdale, who, with cynicism towards the utopian setting, sets off alongside a brotherhood to become encapsulated by transcendentalist notions. This work’s inception was made possible by Hawthorne’s partaking the Brook farm project of the 1840s. Hawthorne’s objective during this experiment

instead of such institutions, self-reliance and individualism are where people perform at their best. The transcendental movement in the 19th century was met with a small wave of skeptics, most notably, authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who were part of a subgenre of Romanticism called Dark Romanticism. Literature within this subgenre was in direct contrast of the utopian ideas of transcendentalism; these writers did not believe in humanity’s inherent perfection. Furthermore

and social conditions” creates a serious question on the plausibility of a perfect society. Dealing with this very quandary first hand, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance is an experimentation on forming a perfect utopia. Within the novel, the desires of the individual are squandered in favor of the collective. In reading Hawthorne, one gets the sense that the world is just out of reach for him. Attaching a mysticism to everything detaches the characters from any sense of reality, meaning

which repeated patterns of light, then blackness, then whiteness meaningfully occur” (Blair 76). Similarly, Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance employs chiaroscuro for its characters, symbols and the veil motif in particular. Blair does not go further in his discussion of whiteness and blackness in “The Minister’s Black Veil” in relation to The Blithedale Romance. An analysis of the use of color, particularly regarding the veil symbol, in both texts can provide additional insights into Hawthorne’s

novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prefaces to The Blithedale Romance and The House of the Seven Gables and his short tale “The Custom House” incorporate the Romantic ideals of intuition, nature, and imagination. These three Romantic traits are prevalent and key throughout Hawthorne’s first novel, The Scarlet Letter, as Hawthorne uses them

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Maria Susanna Cummins’ The Lamplighter are vastly different books. While originally published within two years of each other, both authors approached their writing through distinctive practices. Hawthorne failed to show development in a majority of his characters while Cummins’ novel is heavily loaded with positive character growth. After reading The Blithedale Romance and The Lamplighter, one of the main differences noted was that the development

In the novel, The Blithedale Romance, the main character Miles Coverdale claims to believe in gender equality. Throughout the novel Coverdale and Zenobia discuss the issues of feminism and gender roles. Although he appears to sympathize with Zenobia’s feminist cause, there were occasions in the novel which proved otherwise. Coverdale’s support for Zenobia’s fight for equality might only be an act to win her approval. The purpose of the Blithedale community was for it to be a place where individuals

Gender in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance    The Blithedale Romance, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a story of a twisted utopia. This perfect world is twisted in that the roles of gender have a traditional utopian representation, only with a more contemporary take. Of course, this is interesting because this book was written and published in the 19th century when such ideas were beginning to establish a form for the genre of writing. Hawthorne combines fantasy, philosophy, mystery