"Trading Places in Fancy": Hawthorne's Critique of Sympathetic Identification in The Blithedale Romance

I am not sure that ... the Blithedale Romance [is] not, strictly speaking, [a] novel rather than [a] romance.

W.D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction

The Blithedale Novel

Lori Merish rightly says of Hawthorne that "[n]o nineteenth-century American author delved more deeply into the entanglements of sympathy ... outlined in Scottish discourse and American sentimental fiction" (171).1 She sees Blithedale as a record of Hawthorne's "fascination with the bonds of sympathy, and with the forms of emotional and erotic bondage legitimated within liberal 'public' and 'private' cultures" (171). This reading draws heavily on the novel's many examples of interpersonal domination enacted in the name of sympathy. Like most Hawthorne scholarship, this approach considers the novel's treatment of sympathy as an extension of its generic identity: the novel, like the community of Blithedale, is "a world elsewhere."2 The critical tradition understands The Blithedale Romance as an exemplum of romantic ideology; it reads the self-conscious title as a straightforward classification of the novel's and the author's aesthetic commitments.3 But this approach proceeds at the expense of a profound and self-reflexive ambivalence that structures the novel from its inception. The characteristics that critics use to classify the novel as a romance are the very conventions the novel calls into question. Thus, if we are to associate Hawthorne's explanation of sympathy with any genre, it should not be with either romance or sentimental fiction. Instead of viewing it simply as a culminating moment in the tradition of American romance, I would prefer to understand The Blithedale Romance as a transitional novel that offers a critique of romanticism in particular and sentimental culture in general. In so doing, it anticipates realism as a literary mode. Philanthropy, like realism, is meant to be a modern incarnation of the sympathetic ethic and Hawthorne's way of representing philanthropy wrests it from an eighteenth-century framework and re-tailors it for a more modern model of social relations. Thus, the novel's obsession with sympathy and its thematization of philanthropy are part of the same project.

There are several reasons for assuming this position. As Annette Kolodny points out, The Blithedale Romance "stands as Hawthorne's only major work to treat contemporary social issues in anything other than symbolic rendering" (xxvii); the novel is a veritable compendium of contemporary cultural references including such figures as Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, and Joseph Smith as well as publications including The Dial, The North American Review, social movements such as women's suffrage and prison reform, and fads like mesmerism. This relative topicality stems in part from its genesis in Hawthorne's own experiences at Brook Farm, the Utopian socialist community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. His decision to write so directly about contemporaneous cultural phenomena and related social issues has important implications for the project at hand. It magnifies aesthetic questions already placed in the foreground by the novel's self-conscious title. Hawthorne's prefatory statement regarding the work's relation or lack of relation to actual events belongs to a larger pattern of self-reflexivity, which becomes a meditation on the comparative values of Romance and Realism. he insists that his concern with the Utopian community at Brook Farm is "merely to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real life" (1). The point here is not to try to calibrate the sincerity of Hawthorne's claims and then go on to read Blithedale as a roman a clef as some critics do. I am not interested in how thinly veiled this fictional account appears to be so much as in the gesture of dropping the veil in the first place.

Rather than offering a straightforward disclaimer, Hawthorne expands the rationale behind his apology to compare American and European contexts for literary production and find America wanting. he argues that European writers are granted greater "license" in their representational strategies; their work "is not put exactly side by side with nature" (2). By contrast, in American culture there is "no such Faery Land, so like the real world, that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own" (2). Hawthorne's complaint expresses the widely held belief that America was too firmly grounded in reality, because it lacked the mediating influence of longstanding cultural traditions that provide authors with material suitable for romance. Thus, as Michael Davitt Bell observes, "fictions based ... on native materials might be national but would hardly be romances" (18). Ironically the rationale for the impossibility of an American romance later became a staple for a critical tradition, which viewed romance as the necessary expressive mode for an American national character. What came to be known as the "romance thesis/' as articulated by Richard Chase and others, held that the thinness of American culture militated against a legitimate social fiction such as that of British Victorians. Attempts to represent the American social system with fidelity worked at crosspurposes with the need for aesthetic coherence. The formal discontinuities that critics attributed to realist fiction stemmed from this fundamental incompatibility between realism and American society.