“We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturalists and scholars. . . . One man renounces the use of animal food; another of coin; . . .and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope”
––Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle (1840) Correspondence
“Nor let the reader condemn any part of the narrative as frivolous, since a subject of such grave reflection diffuses its importance through the minutest particulars, and there is no judging, beforehand, what odd little circumstance may do the office of a blind man’s dog, among the perplexities of this dark investigation.”
––Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Monsieur de Miroir” (1837)
Nineteenth-century fiction writers, like most writers, are preoccupied with the relationship between stories and storytelling. A focus beyond the immediacies of the historical moment in imaginative fictions that approached less worldly themes, or so the argument goes, were defined within the genre of “romance,” an ambiguous term that in Hawthorne’s time, as the critic Nina Baym has elaborated, was used to define fiction distinct from the novel.
The idea is that the realist novel represents reality objectively and the romance does not. The critical history of nineteenth-century fiction has traced the use and value of what is called the “American Romance.” Richard Chase, in The American Novel and its Tradition (1957), Joel Porte’s The Romance in America (1969), Michael Bell’s The Development of American Romance (1980), and Jane Tompkins’ Sensational Designs: The cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (1985) focus on genre, and the terms realism and romance. At the same time, there is no debate that these are matters of degree less than kind, as all narrative represents reality. Whether we categorize a novel as realistic or as a romance we are reading a fiction––which is why we should heed Hawthorne’s caution that we not “condemn any part of the narrative as frivolous, since a subject of such grave reflection diffuses its importance through the minutest particulars.”
So while we acknowledge Hawthorne’s use of the term “romance” in the prefaces to his novels we do well to keep in mind that all fiction (whether romance or realism) is a way of apprehending the world. For Hawthorne, the term “romance” was more affective than essential: it signaled an expectation on the part of readers, and a promise to fulfill the expectation by focusing attention on the narrator of a story whose consciousness narration draws on actual incidents and the narrative shape of the sociohistorical experiences. The intent is “to establish a theatre,” Hawthorne writes, “a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without too close a comparison with the actual events of real life.”
This description, from the preface to The Blithedale Romance, emphasizes the mind’s representation of “actual events” while reminding the reader that fiction is neither true nor untrue—neither wholly realism nor essentially romance. Hawthorne’s comment reminds us that what we call “the real” or the objective” is an account of what is going on in the world and, moreover, that such accounts are historical. Hawthorne’s fictions represent a world in which human activities, and the significance of those activities, are different from our own.
At the same time, of course, Blithedale is a representation of a human community. According to its organizer, George Ripley, Brook Farm was not to be a pastoral retreat so much as a practical and collective response to the ideals of self development that we considered in reading Emerson. The idea of a personal culture in Emerson was inspired by his readings in the German writer Goethe; the idea of bildung Emerson would have also found in the writings of both Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt. As we have discussed in this class, this idea of culture differs from the normative, public, and exclusive use of the term culture (Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said”) as well as definitions of culture that we read about in the literature of anthropology (the behavior and habits and customs of a particular group of people).
As we read in The American Scholar (1838),
This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, — more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself.
You will also remember that Emerson offers a definition in his Culture in The Conduct of Life (1860):
Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities, through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.
That last line is significant. For it underscores Emerson (and Thoreau’s) hesitations about utopian communities such as Brook Farm. One of Thoreau’s biographers, Robert Richardson, describes the reasons why both Emerson and Thoreau declined Ripley’s invitation:
Emersonian individualism is neither antisocial nor imperial; it does not advocate withdrawal from society, nor does it seek to rule others. It is overwhelmingly concerned with the self-education and development of the individual, and convinced that there can be neither love nor society unless one first has a group of autonomous individuals.
The overriding interest in education and development, alongside Emerson’s comment on “the dangers of solitude and repulsion,” is useful for understanding Emerson’s skepticism about utopian ideas. It serves as a useful corrective to the cultural narratives that define Thoreau as someone for whom there was a simple conflict between the individual and society, natural science and literature, nature and culture. Finally, it can clarify Margaret Fuller’s interest in self culture: her application of self culture—she too read and wrote on Goethe—to the social roles and standing of women, and her articulation of a cultural imperative to redetermine the conditions for reforming opportunities for self and social development among women.
Emerson himself was concerned with the experiment at Brook Farm, as well as other social and political reform communities that were inspired by the ideals of Transcendentalism. “See this wide society of laboring men and women,” writes Emerson. “We allow ourselves to be served by them, we live apart from them, and meet them without a salute in the streets. We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in their good fortune, nor foster their hopes, nor in the assembly of people vote for what is dear to them. Thus we enact the part of the selfish noble king detached from the foundation of the world.” Thoreau, too, had been invited to Brook Farm, and he wrote of his concern with the separation from social and civic concerns. “As for these communities,” he write in his journal, “I think I had rather keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.”
This heaven on earth metaphor is useful: it is a bridge to Hawthorne’s preoccupation with the idea of human perfectibility and the well-meaning but to his mind flawed attempts to establish heaven on earth—what he might describe as a recurrence of the Puritan John Winthrop’s desire for a “city on the hill” or a New Jerusalem. Hawthorne, as it happens, was among the early group of about fifty members of Ripley’s utopian community, and he arrived at Brook Farm from Boston in 1841. The Blithedale Romance, a novel that contains references to Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm over the months he resided there. Of course the references to his experience––that Hawthorne disavows in calling the experiences “incidental” to the tale––are not documentary but rather a setting for exploring the story through the characters of Coverdale (the narrator), Zenobia, Hollingsworth, and Priscilla.
Further Reading
Stoehr, Taylor. “Art vs. Utopia: The Case of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Brook Farm.” The Antioch Review 36.1 (1978) 89–102.
Berlant, Lauren. “Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance.” American Literary History 1.1 (1989): 30–62.
