Hawthorne's Hamlet: The Archetypal Structure of The Blithedale Romance

Hawthorne's Hamlet: The Archetypal Structure of The Blithedale Romance WILLIAM E. GRANT The structural difficulties of The Blithedale Romance have posed a persistent problem for critics seeking to come to terms with Nathaniel Hawthorne's most personal — and frequendy most frustrating—novel. Though somewhat rescued in recent years from an undeserved reputation as a failed venture into autobiography and social criticism, the novel has still been considered on the formal level as little more than the "architectonic failure"1 one critic dubs it: its basic elements unassimilated into a coherent whole, and its final effect one of chaos rather than order. And such a criticism is at least partially just. The social level of the novel — Hawthorne's criticism of the Brook Farm experiment— is never fully assimilated into the larger fabric of the work, while certain episodes — Zenobia's tale of the Veiled Lady being a good example — seem only tangentially related to the material of the main narrative line. Even the style, which ranges from the Gothic portrait of the sinister Westervelt to the stark realism of Zenobia's death, scarcely seems of a piece. Yet, while the novel can, and undoubtedly should, be faulted on all these grounds, it is not, as too many of its critics have maintained, either formless or chaotic. The Blithedale Romance follows a recognizable archetypal pattern which lends coherence to its events and relationships, and which generates a structural unity within an only apparently formless narrative. Through an understanding of this archetypal pattern we can see the William E. Grant is director of the American Studies Program at the University of Louisville . 'Allan and Barbara Lefcowitz, "Some Rents in the Veil: New Light on Priscilla and Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance," Nineteenth Century Fiction, 21 (1966), 275. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW1 way in which the novel succeeds structurally, and against that background we can evaluate the persistent stylistic problems which continue to plague the reader. Using, as I do here, the insights into literary structure offered by Freud, Jung, Kenneth Burke, Maud Bodkin and Ernest Jones, we can isolate the archetypal pattern which unifies the work with impressive artistry at the structural level, while still recognizing that serious flaws in style forbid any claims for the novel's total success. The structural success Hawthorne achieves, however, is not to be taken lightly, as it places The Blithedale Romance clearly within the great tradition of the Oedipal archetype and relates it within that tradition most particularly to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Generally the critics who have most successfully dealt with the structure of The Blithedale Romance are those who have approached the novel through either psychological or mythological analysis. Attuned to the psychological level at which the novel operates, their criticism has cast some important light upon the rich texture of the work, and they have rather conclusively demonstrated that this romance shares many of the psychological and mythological concerns which inform Hawthorne's other romances and tales. They have been less successful, however, in dealing with the unity of the work, tending instead to justify, sometimes ingeniously, its evident lack of form. Frederick Crews, for example, attempts to rationalize the formlessness of the work by comparing it to a dream. According to this reading, the book is "primarily concerned with Coverdale's mind"2 and the episodes stand as a record of his attempt to create a romance from the events of the Blithedale experiment — a process which closely resembles dreaming, and which shares the apparent chaos of dreams. Even more direct in asserting the relationship between novel and dream is Kelly Griffin, Jr., who describes the form of The Blithedale Romance as "an interior monologue, which represents the narrator's illogical thought processes and his attempt to shift events in his mind until he can settle on an 1 Frederick C. Crews, "A New Reading of The Blithedale Romance," American Literature, 29 (1957), 169. 2 HAWTHORNE'S HAMLET arrangement satisfactory to himself."3 This thought process gives us a structure, according to Griffin, in which the first half of the novel is essentially realistic, while the latter half is a "voyage through chaos — mental chaos"4 as represented in a series of...