Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance Essay -- Nathaniel Hawtho

Nathaniel Hawthornes The Blithedale RomanceIn the penultimate chapter of Nathaniel Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale offers a moral at the end of the narrative that specifically addresses Hollingsworths philanthropic and personal failures admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be a great deal useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is uncertain to the singular whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich juices of which God never meant should be touch violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process, only should render life history sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, and insensibly influence over opposite hearts and other lives to the same blessed end. (348)Coverdales moral, which implicates all of the reformers, including twain Hollingsworth and himself, implies that an Edenic world created by individuals unwill ing to acknowledge a deterministic existence lastly proves destructive, both to the self and to others. It non only proves fatal for the individualas evidenced in Hollingsworths ruling passion, Coverdales disillusionment, and Zenobias suicidebut it also proves fatal to the community, composed of rich juices symbolically depicted throughout the novel as fruit, specifically grapes and wine, that represent its members and their desires. When touch violently, these ruling passions follow an unnatural process that cannot accommodate a life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, or one that accepts a predetermined course not governed by individual human will. Coverdales journey, a journey not only temporally taken through seasons ... ...to establish community in a predetermined world. The latter depiction only results in isolation, in the death-in-life state even Coverdale cannot escape at the end. The bubbled world encapsulated in the revelers painting offers a momentarily glimpse int o the ending Hawthorne does not give the romance. Rather, he leaves us with the last paintings lesson, the broken bubble that not only describes Blithedale, Hollingsworth, and Zenobia, it also describes Coverdale, who sits in judgement on others, even in his memory, and leaves himself, like the New England toper, in isolation. If, in Hawthornes view, we should accept a predetermined course, acknowledging that we have no free will and no orifice for a Paradisiacal world devoid of corruption, then we should also tick to share together in a communal spirit that ultimately defeats absolutism and isolation.