1. Page references cited in parentheses in the text are to The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. III, The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, ed. Pearce, Roy Harvey (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1964).Google Scholar References to other volumes of the Centenary Edition will be made to titles only, not to volume number.

2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The House of the Seven Gables (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 2.Google Scholar

3. Porte, Joel, The Romance in America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), p. 126.Google Scholar

4. Levy, Leo B., “The Blithedale Romance: Hawthorne's ‘Voyage Through Chaos,’” Studies in Romanticism 8 (1968), 6, 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar My historical perspective on Blithedale closely resembles Levy's. He explains the fragmentation evoked in the book as stemming from “an encroaching technological and urban revolution” and from “the extinction of predominantly rural America” (3, 2).

5. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Twice-told Tales (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), p. 6.Google Scholar From the 1851 preface.

6. Martin, Terence, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 138–9.Google Scholar See also Charvat, William, The Origins of American Critical Thought (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1959). Chap. 1.Google Scholar

7. Complacency may have been a front for widespread insecurity, as Somkin, Fred shows in Uniquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967).Google Scholar

8. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Journey to America, Trans. Lawrence, George, ed. Mayer, J. P. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), p. 48Google Scholar. Tocqueville's emphasis.

9. See Levin, David, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978).Google Scholar

10. Miller, Perry, Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), esp. pp. 1–14 and 197–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Raven and the Whale (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956)Google Scholar, esp. Chap. 2; also Huntington, David C., “Frederic Church's Niagara: Nature and the Nation's Type,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 25 (1983), 100–138.Google Scholar

11. Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; rpt., New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 8.Google Scholar

12. Baym, Nina, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976). Chap. 2–5.Google Scholar

13. The phrase is Hawthorne's wife Sophia's, but I think she represents his sentiments accurately. After he missed the funeral of his Louisa, sister in 08 1852Google Scholar, Sophia wrote her family, “It would have been so painful to him to go through any ceremony, and to hear all the Calvinistic talk.” Quoted in Mellow, James R., Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), p. 412.Google Scholar

14. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), chap. 2.Google Scholar

15. The rime for the letter A in The New England Primer is “In Adam's Fall / We Sinned all.”

16. Melville, I believe, sensed the provisional and undogmatic character of Hawthorne's conception of sin in his famous meditation on “blackness.” He suggests that “perhaps unknown to himself” Hawthorne has “a touch of Puritanic gloom,” that his “power of blackness … appeals to” a widely shared sense of sin “in some shape or other,” and that thoughtful persons need “something, somehow like Original Sin” for a balanced account of human nature (my emphases). “Something, somehow like Original Sin” is not a dogma but a fiction, however necessary it may be for an adequate understanding of man's condition. The whole meditation is full of qualifications, and presents Hawthorne's “Calvinism” as a cast of mind rather than a set of doctrines. I quote from Melville, Herman, “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” in Moby-Dick (New York: W. W. Norton, Critical Edition, 1967), pp. 540–41.Google Scholar

17. See Edwards, Jonathan, Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 96–7, 100, 116–18Google Scholar, etc. Edwards's identification of the heart with the will or affective personality is characteristic of a pervasive tendency in Puritan theology, for example in the theology of Cotton or Perkins. There is also plenty of authority for Edwards's usage in the Bible.

18. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Mosses from an Old Manse (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), p. 403.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., p. 404.

20. See Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

21. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The American Notebooks (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1972), p. 237.Google Scholar

22. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), p. 48.Google Scholar

23. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), p. 4.Google Scholar

24. Hawthorne, , Scarlet Letter, p. 86.Google Scholar

25. Francis, Richard, “The Ideology of Brook Farm,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1977), 15.Google Scholar

26. A well-balanced treatment of Hawthorne's shifting relation with Coverdale appears in Brodhead, Richard's fine chapter on Blithedale in Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 91–115, esp. 100–03.Google Scholar

27. Poirier, Richard, A World Elsewhere (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 115–24Google Scholar; Bales, Kent, “The Blithedale Romance: Coverdale's Mean and Subversive Egotism,” Bucknell Review 21 no. 2 (1973), 60–82Google Scholar; Justus, James H., “Hawthorne's Coverdale: Character and Art in The Blithedale Romance,” American Literature 47 (1975), 21–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Crews, Frederick C., The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), chap. 11.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., p. 194.

30. Limitations of space make a full comparison impossible here, but see Hawthorne, 's Blithedale, pp. 149–50Google Scholar, and American Notebooks, pp. 496–7Google Scholar; Blithedale, p. 205Google Scholar and Notebooks, p. 207Google Scholar; Blithedale, p. 207Google Scholar and Notebooks, 211Google Scholar, Blithedale, pp. and Notebooks, pp. 201–2Google Scholar; Blithedale, pp. 9–47Google Scholar and The Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Chicago: Society of the Dofobs, 1907), pp. 3–15.Google Scholar

31. See Poirier, , World ElsewhereGoogle Scholar, for a fine treatment of Coverdale's voice.

32. My argument has been anticipated here by Martin, Terence, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Twayne, 1965), pp. 151–2.Google Scholar

33. See the account of “temperament” in Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Experience,” in Emerson, E. W., ed., The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., Centenary Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), III, 50–55.Google Scholar

34. The student was Gerald Goldschmidt.

35. Whipple, Edwin P., Character and Characteristic Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1866), pp. 235–6.Google Scholar The context is Whipple's discussion of Blithedale. Since Hawthorne had asked him for comments and corrections of the manuscript of Blithedale, Whipple had an insider's appreciation of Hawthorne's uneasiness with respect to the book. See Roy Harvey Pearce, “Introduction to The Blithedale Romance,” in vol. III of The Centenary Edition, pp. xviii–xix.Google Scholar

36. Warren, Robert Penn, “Hawthorne Revisited: Some Remarks on Hellfiredness,” Sewanne Review 81 (1973), 95, 111.Google Scholar

37. I follow Baym, 203–15, in these conjectures concerning Hawthorne's state of mind in 1852–53.

38. Levy, , in “Hawthorne's ‘Voyage Through Chaos,’”Google Scholar also focuses on this comparison, and sees Coverdale as an alientated urban intellectual observing an alien world (Levy, , p. 14).Google Scholar

39. Hawthorne, , House of the Seven Gables, p. 38.Google Scholar

40. Hawthorne, , Scarlet Letter, p. 127; Snow-Image, p. 99.Google Scholar

41. Veil and mask imagery are discussed as elements of symbolic texture in Davidson, Frank, “Toward a Revaluation of The Blithedale Romance,” New England Quarterly 25 (1952), 374–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in Waggoner, Hyatt, Hawthorne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955), chap. 7.Google Scholar

In his 1836 notebooks, Hawthorne writes, “A veil may be needful, but never a mask” (American Notebooks, p. 23).Google Scholar Even in Blithedale, one can sometimes make distinctions between the two images, for example in “The Silvery Veil.” For my purposes, however, their significance and resonance blend into each other — both are means to theatricality and illusion.

42. We should distinguish between the allusions Hawthorne attributes to Coverdale and those he develops for himself as implied author. For example, the word “Blithedale” is meant to recall the Happy Valley in Johnson, 's Rasselas.Google Scholar (Iowe this observation to Norman Holmes Pearson.) Hawthorne probably gave Blithedale as a whole the design of a sophisticated pastoral, as Anhorn, Judy Schaaf suggests in “‘Gifted Simplicity of Vision’: Pastoral Expectations in The Blithedale Romance,” ESQ 28 (1982), 135–53.Google Scholar Perhaps he also drew consciously on Spencer, 's Shepheardes CalendarGoogle Scholar for language, structure, and seasonal motifs, as John Shroeder argues in “Miles Coverdale's Calendar; or, A Major Literary Source for The Blithedale Romance,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 103 (1967), 353–64.Google Scholar Of these significant allusions and designs Coverdale seems unaware; his allusions are usually fugitive reflections of his independent temperament.

43. The Scarlet Letter, p. 9.Google Scholar

44. See the introductory poem in the 1850 version of Nature, in Emerson, , Works, 1Google Scholar, 1. Hawthorne pokes fun at this key Emersonian symbol in The House of the Seven Gables, pp. 259–60.Google Scholar

45. Hawthorne, , American Notebooks, pp. 246, 249, 337, 388–9.Google Scholar

46. Emerson, , Works, I, 29.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., I, 83.

48. After Hawthorne and Emerson visited Edmund Hosmer, Emerson, 's and Thoreau, 's “good yeoman,” in 08 1842Google Scholar, Hawthorne contrasted Emerson as “the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloud-land, in vain search for something real” with Hosmer as “the man of sturdy sense, all whose ideas seem to be dug out of his mind, hard and substantial, as he digs potatoes, beets, carrots, and turnips out of the earth” (Hawthorne, , American Notebooks, p. 336).Google Scholar

49. Emerson, , Works, III, 45, 50.Google Scholar

50. Quoted in Whitman, Walt's, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed., Cowley, Malcolm (New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. ix.Google Scholar

51. Emerson, , Works, I, 76Google Scholar; II, 314.

52. Ibid., II, 320, 318, 306. When Emerson presented himself as “an endless seeker with no Past at [his] back,” he vexed Hawthorne. In an entry dated September 2,1842, Hawthorne calls Emerson, “that everlasting rejecter of all that is, and seeker for he knows not what” (American Notebooks, p. 357).Google Scholar

53. Emerson, , Works, I, 11.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., HI, 72.

55. This resemblance is argued, I think too simply, in Van Cromphout, Gustav, “Emerson, Hawthorne, and The Blithedale Romance,” Georgia Review 25 (1971), 471–80.Google Scholar If, as Van Cromphout properly shows, Emerson's strictures on reformers in his 1842 “Lecture on the Times” anticipate Hawthorne—Coverdale's, Emerson's own comments on Blithedale imply that he quite disliked it, not that he agreed with it. See Emerson in His Journals, ed. Porte, Joel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), p. 548Google Scholar and Emerson, , Works, X, 363–4.Google Scholar

56. Emerson, , Works, I, 84.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., IX, 78.

58. See Hawthorne, 's letter to Bridge, Horatio for 13 10 1852Google Scholar, cited by Pearce in vol. III of the Centenary Edition, p. xxii.

59. Westminster Review 58, 10 1852, 592–8.Google Scholar

60. See Haight, Gordon S., ed., The George Eliot Letters (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), II, 55. Mr. Haight tells me that he thinks from its language that the review is by an American.Google Scholar