[In honor of May Day/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]
On the novel
that significantly shifted an author’s career—and yet its continuity with his
two prior masterpieces.
Nearly a century
before Richard Wright published his autobiographical essay “I Tried to Be a
Communist” (1944), Nathaniel Hawthorne published a semi-autobiographical novel
that could have been titled the exact same thing. Between April and November
1841, Hawthorne lived at George
and Sophia Ripley’s West Roxbury, Massachusetts
utopian experiment
Brook Farm; the experiment brought together many other prominent
Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson
Alcott. Hawthorne’s experience with the Brook Farm community (which continued
for another six years or so after his departure) was mixed, as reflected both
in the letters he wrote while there to his future
wife Sophia Peabody and in his subsequent description of the period as
“essentially a daydream, and yet a fact.” And just over a decade later, he
would portray a strikingly similar utopian community in The
Blithedale Romance (1852).
Blithedale was Hawthorne’s third romance
in three years—following The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables
(1851)—and marked a significant shift from the prior two. I would categorize
both of them as historical romances: Scarlet
quite overtly, as it is set more than two hundred years prior to its
publication date; and Gables in its
central use of the Salem Witch Trials, a history which Hawthorne calls in the novel’s famous Preface
“a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into
our own
broad day-light, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist.” Blithedale, on the other hand, is not
only set in its own historical moment but centrally focused on engaging with,
challenging, and at times satirizing that moment’s philosophies and ideals,
most especially those of both Transcendentalism and communism. Perhaps to aid
in that sense of present grounding, Hawthorne likewise shifts from the earlier
novels’ third-person narrators to a semi-autobiographical (if also quite
complex) first-person one, Miles
Coverdale, who narrates for us his own experiences of the Blithedale
utopian community.
But if Blithedale is interestingly distinct
from the two novels that preceded it, I would nonetheless argue that reading it
in relationship to those historical romances helps us analyze how Hawthorne
chooses to depict his socially realistic topic. After all, both earlier novels
likewise featured realistic historical subjects—community in Puritan New
England and the causes and legacies of the Witch Trials—but portrayed them
through what Hawthorne described, in that Gables
Preface, as the Romance’s “right to present that truth under circumstances,
to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (in contrast to
the Novel, which he argues “is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity … to
the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience”). Literary historians
have long sought to pin down which Blithedale
character is which historical figure—Zenobia
is Fuller! Hollingsworth is Ripley! and so on—but Hawthorne’s definition of
the Romance would lead us in a different direction: to consider instead how he
bends the historical realities of that place and time into a new, more Romantic
shape, “manages his atmospherical medium” to present “the truth of the human
heart.” Like both prior novels, that is, Blithedale
ultimately presents the human heart of its histories—an important achievement
indeed.
Last cultural
communism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?
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