INTRODUCTORY NOTE. THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE. "THE Blithedale Romance" follows in order of time "The House of the Seven Gables;" having been written during the winter of 1851-52, which Hawthorne spent at West Newton, Massachusetts. It may here be observed incidentally that no two of his romances were composed in the same place. "The Scarlet Letter" was written at Salem; the "Seven Gables" at Lenox; "The Marble Faun" partially at Florence, Italy, - being afterwards recast at Redcar, England; and the final, unfinished ones, “Septimius Felton" and "The Dolliver Romance" were produced at The Wayside, in Concord. Sundry externals of the scenery and character in "The Blithedale Romance were suggested by the sojourn of the author with the transcendental and socialistic community at Brook Farm, Roxbury, then (1841) on the outskirts of Boston. But it would be a serious error were we to conclude that he intended giving, under this imaginative cover, any comprehensive impression of that interesting experiment. As he observes in the Preface, "His whole treatment of the affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance; nor does he put forward the slightest 3 pretensions to illustrate a theory or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism." 1 None the less, there are some interesting correspondences to be noticed between personages and surroundings in the book, and actual observations of the au, thor at the community or elsewhere. The picturesque setting of the twenty-fourth chapter, entitled "The Masqueraders," will be found sketched in a passage of the "American Note-Books," dated September 28, 1841, which gives some details of a fancy dress picnic party gotten up by some of the Brook Farmers. One of the two entries under September 27th, also, contains an account of a grape-vine in the neighborhood, ascending" almost to the tip of a large white-pine," by means of which he mounted into the tree-boughs and ate the fruit there. The same grape vine is charmingly utilized in "Coverdale's Hermitage," that "kind of leafy cave" formed by a wreathing “entanglement of tendrils" high up among the branches of a pine-tree. The original of Old Moodie is manifestly an individual whom the author long afterward (in 1850) saw lingering in front of a restaurant in Court Square, Boston, and commented upon in his journal as wearing a patch over one eye and having "a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability about him... and a kind of decency in his red-nosed and groggy destitution." From that slight sketch was constructed the dubious and pathetic figure of Moodie, father to Zenobia and Priscilla, who is depicted as a fugitive hiding under an assumed name, to escape the conse 1 With regard to this whole subject of the relation existing between The Blithedale Romance and Hawthorne's Brook Farm con nection, the reader may consult the fifth chapter of A Study of Haw shorne. The Blithedale Romance, Chapter XIL quences of a financial crime. The name Fauntleroy, given as his real one, was probably borrowed from that banker, Henry Fauntleroy, whose forgeries, pros ecuted by the Bank of England and leading to his execution, made him a distinguished character in criminal history, about the year 1824, while Hawthorne was still a Bowdoin undergraduate. The daughter Priscilla was, to begin with, modelled on a diminutive woman, a seamstress, who spent a week at Brook Farm, and appears in the "Note-Books" (October 9, 1841). But it will be seen, on comparison, that Priscilla is etherealized into a something which can be likened to the model only in a superficial way. Zenobia, the other daughter, who holds so important a place in the romance, it has been thought was sug gested by Margaret Fuller, or by a lady who was actually domiciled at Brook Farm while Hawthorne was staying there. Both these theories are doubtless incorrect, so far as they assume that Hawthorne consciously drew from either of the persons in question. Margaret Fuller was not a member of the community at all, any more than was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in popular estimation, has been identified with it. Furthermore, a gentleman who lived at the farm has declared to the writer that, while Zenobia did not recall Margaret Fuller, he fancied he saw in her a partial resemblance to several women. In fact, the main likeness to Miss Fuller seems to have lain in Zenobia's reputed literary renown, and in a certain graceful strength of character common to both. Some who have inclined to insist on the resemblance admit simul 1 The case of Fauntleroy is given at some length in William Howitt's Northern Heights of London (p. 415). That account is takes from The Gertleman's Magazine for 1824, Part II., 461. |