Blithedale Romance, The.
[Fuller, Margaret]. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852.
8vo.; pale yellow endpapers; pages fresh and bright; brown cloth, ornately stamped in gilt and blind; a tight, handsome copy.
First edition of Hawthorne’s tragicomic roman-a-clef, based on his days as part of the Transcen- dentalist Utopian community at Brook Farm. With a four-page publisher’s catalogue, dated April 1852, tipped in at front. The narrator of The Blithedale Romance, Miles Coverdale, travels to the fictional Utopian community of Blithedale, where he falls under the influence of various eccentric personalities, none so eccentric as the exotic feminist Zenobia—the character based on Hawthorne’s friend and fellow Brook Farm resident Margaret Fuller. Hawthorne’s portrait of Fuller (who, as Zenobia, is the book’s major female protagonist) is both scathing and touching. Zenobia, a theatrical and seductive woman, is known around Blithedale for her ability to tell fantastic stories, flirt relentlessly, and for her numerous “tracts in defense of her sex.” She is the object of the narrator’s scorn, but also his admiration:
...my inner consciousness [receded with] the entrance of Zenobia. She came with the welcome intelligence that supper was on the table. Looking at herself in the glass, and perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown rather languid (probably by being exposed to the fervency of the kitchen fire), she flung it on the floor, as unconcernedly as a village girl would throw away a faded violet. The action seemed proper to her character, although, methought, it would still have more befitted the bounteous nature of this beautiful woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand, and to revive faded ones by her touch. Nevertheless, it was a singular and irresistible effect; the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise [i.e., Blithedale] to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us to live in... (p. 28)
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