Speaking with "Hands at our Throats": The Struggle for Artistic Voice in The Blithedale Romance
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Notes
1. Mary Suzanne Schriber, "Justice to Zenobia," NEQ, 55 (1982), 61.
2. Schriber, p. 62.
3. Beverly Hume argues that Coverdale may be a "mad" narrator in "Restructuring the Case Against Hawthorne's Coverdale," NCF, 40 (1986), 387-99. For the most persuasive argument that Zenobia is murdered, see John Harmon McElroy and Edward L. McDonald, "The Coverdale Romance," SNNTS, 14 (1982), 1-16.
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New York: Norton, 1958), pp. 35-36. All subsequent references to this work will be in the text.
5. For a further discussion of the language-game, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1968), especially pp. 2-27. Wittgenstein equates the rules of a given language with the arbitrary rules of any game; rather than signifying a necessary meaning, then, a word's meaning is determined by the context in which it exists.
6. Peggy Kamuf provides a fascinating discussion of this idea in "Hawthorne's Genres: The Letter of the Law Appliquee," repr. in After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 69-84.
7. I use the word "typological," not with any religious connotations, but in order to avoid the ambiguity associated with "symbol." By the typological or symbolic imagination, I refer to the conceptual paradigm that assumes ideas to be necessarily associated with or embodied in material or linguistic realities. For a further discussion of symbol versus allegory, see Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979).
8. Jonathan Auerbach, The Romance of Failure (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 102.
9. Quoted by Edward Wagennecht in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Man and Writer (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 150.
10. Jacqueline E. Orsagh, "Blithedale: Another Lesson for Dark Ladies," CentR, 31 (1987), 291-307.
11. See, for example, Susan Gubar's "'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 292-313.
12. Schriber, p. 72.
13. Schriber's essay explores yet another of Zenobia's rhetorical statements. Zenobia claims, "lip of man will never touch my hand again. I intend to become a Catholic, for the sake of going into a nunnery" (p. 232). As Schriber observes, "this is obviously a self-dramatizing, literary Zenobia who is casting herself not merely as a romance heroine but in the single role most unlikely for a woman of her temperament. Certainly no further indication of her wit, her distance from heartbreak, her literary acumen, and her estimate of Coverdale is needed" (p. 74).
14. Hawthorne, "The Custom House" section of The Scarlet Letter (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 31.
15. Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 120.
16. Thomas F. Strychacz, "Coverdale and Women: Feverish Fantasies in The Blithedale Romance," ATQ, 62 (1986), 41.
17. Jac Tharpe, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Identity and Knowledge (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1967), p. 129.
18. Evan Carton, The Rhetoric of American Romance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), p. 246.
19. Strychacz also discusses this tension in his analysis of the novel's ending, describing it as "a discrepancy between fantasy and actuality" (p. 43).
20. Bryan J. Wolf, Romantic Re-vision (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 106.
