The Idea of Community

Introduction

The Blithedale Romance is the novel which is written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The main purpose of this research paper is to evaluate the novel to identify its cultural context and also to know the importance of its cultural scene. The Blithedale Romance includes such a deep understanding of community ideas which helps and supports to develop an idea of building a community.

The Blithedale Romace by Nathaniel Hawthorne can be understand in its real meaning when it is interpreted according to the cultural values which are discussed in this novel. In order to understand the meaning of the novel in a better sense it is very much necessary to go in to its cultural context. The Blithedale inhabitants arise to begin the reformation of the world, as Coverdale ironically describes it. Hollingsworth prays solemnly in his room, while Coverdale wonders why he has left his pleasant bachelor quarters and excellent meals at nearby hotels to go to Blithedale.

Thesis Statement

Hawthorne's novel The Blithedale Romance resists and opposes Fourier and Brisbane's concept that "the root of evil is our incoherent system of industry", by providing a lens where evil is revealed in the heart of human nature portrayed through human desires.

The Blithedale Romance a product of its culture

The only one of Hawthorne's novels to use a first-person narrator, The Blithedale Romance explores the fictional utopian community of Blithedale and is drawn, at least in part, from the novelist's own experiences at Brook Farm. And yet, he claims, Instead his aim in the novel is 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 lives (Hawthorne. 77-80). Despite these claims, the novel's reception has been complicated by the fact that its narrator, Miles Coverdale, like Hawthorne, is a writer who travels to an experimental community in the midst of an April snowstorm. Similarly, critics have noted that Hawthorne draws heavily from his own journals and letters from his days at Brook Farm in his construction of Blithedale. While conflating an author's biography and his fiction, his narrator and his own voice, is always a dangerous interpretative practice, Hawthorne's own experiences clearly underlie much of The Blithedale Romance (Louise, 97).

The variety in the scenery is similarly enhanced by juxtaposition, as of the Hermitage and the Hotel, Elliot's Pulpit and the Boarding-house; just as the healthy atmosphere of the fields is set off by the miasmas of Mesmerism and Spiritualism, which, in this instance, represent the inevitable element of superstition. The only point made plain is the baleful and blighting effect of the philanthropy that overrides private personal claims. The book is the tragedy of which Dickens' Mrs. Jellaby is the comedy; and it is the most dismal ever written by the author, the only rays of light being the rustic scenes, and the impressive emancipation of Priscilla in the ...