Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance: the Morbid Middle Class and the Failure of Romance

초록

The present paper examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance in terms of morbidity inherent in antebellum middle-class culture. The chaos and confusion created by excessive social fluidity and mobility during the Jacksonian period made the middle class—the newly emerging hegemonic social group—feel chronically insecure about its own social status. Such middle-class anxieties led to the creation of the symbol of the “Veiled Lady,” the image of an oppressively disembodied female body. This cultural image was vigorously promoted by the domestic ideal and the popular culture of the nineteenth century such as mesmerism and spiritualism in order to help white male middle-class Americans to forget the heartless reality of extreme capitalist competition. Middle-class culture, in turn, created Coverdale, an apolitical and voyeuristic consumer confined in the enclosed private world of the home, in which he consumed the lean and wan female image of the Veiled Lady to gratify his sexual and patriarchal desire vicariously. Blithedale is therefore designed as a place to reform this morbid state of middle-class culture. Its ambition for reform, however, is forestalled because it has been merely a mask to hide the egotism of middle-class reformers at Blithedale. Rather than reforming them, the utopian community exacerbates and drives into catastrophe their egotism and morbidity, simultaneously revealing structural limitations persisting in the cultural elements of the middle class such as domesticity, mesmerism, spiritualism, privacy, and consumerism. Eventually, in the process of investigating the failures of the utopian experiment, the author Hawthorne specifically exposes drawbacks intrinsic both to the middle-class reform ideology of sentimentalism through the disingenuous narrator Coverdale and to the middle-class genre of romance through the extravagantly abortive narrative of The Blithedale Romance. In other words, the writer disintegrates his existing authorial practices based on sentimentalism and the romance genre, discerning the impending violent breakdown of the corrupt middle class.

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