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5 The Tenderness of Beasts Hawthorne at Blithedale Favorable or Otherwise What would it mean if, just this once, we were to read Hawthorne straight? With respect to The Blithedale Romance, nothing, it seems, has been less easily accomplished. In his famous preface to that novel of 1852—famous largely for its meditation on the perils and possibilities, for the “the American romancer,” of “Fiction” in its relation to “everyday Probability”1 —Hawthorne begs us to recall that the novel that follows , whatever its origins in “the Socialist Community” established at Brook Farm, emphatically does not “put forward the slightest pretensions to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to Socialism” (BR, 1). This is perhaps the least believed-in sentence Hawthorne would ever write. Over many decades, and for a range of plausible reasons, Americanist literary criticism has found the notion of Hawthorne’s demurral from conclusiveness especially hard to credit, taking it, for the most part, as still another expression of the book’s sustained and elegant duplicity. We might well wonder, though, what shape this “brightest” and “liveliest” of Hawthorne novels (as Henry James had it) might finally acquire if we were to read it apart from the set of morals we are often assured it elaborates: that philanthropy and utopian politics more generally are undertakings dangerously entangled with both fatuous self-deceit and megalomaniacal narcissism, and tend in this way toward various kinds of “moral obliquity,” as our narrator Miles Coverdale puts it; that Brook Farm was accordingly a terrible failure; that, more abstractly, languages of mass politics and intimate politics function each as misarticulations of the sphere of the other, consigning both to terminal dissatisfaction; and that powerful women, whatever the strength and tenacity of their convictions, can be brought low by the errant swervings of their heart’s passion.2 Read in this way, Blithedale seems a not untypical exercise in what we might call 146 Speech and Silence Hawthornean conservativism: an ambivalent, in many ways not wholly unsympathetic, account of the dangers, to the self but not only to the self, that come trundling in with the overstepping of the narrow parameters of tradition and convention and ordered social propriety. No one would suggest there is nothing to such a reading, because of course there is. Any even cursory approach to the very plot of the novel, or to the fate of its main characters, would seem to confirm it: Zenobia is destroyed, Hollingsworth lives on a broken and diminished man, and Miles passes through the world meekly and melancholically, laboring to find, among his accumulated failures, a long-spent ambition to be proud of having once possessed. Blithedale reads in all these respects (and in ways that set it in intriguing conversation with the work of Hawthorne’s Concord neighbor Thoreau) as a novel about disappointment, in its most spectacularly public and obliquely inward dimensions. Or so it would appear. But once we begin to take seriously even the glancing possibility that Hawthorne, in his admonition to his reader, might be doing something other than, for instance, lying, then precisely this sense of the book, as a rueful and satiric brief against heedless reformist zeal, changes its bearings dramatically. What sort of story does it become if we take that disavowal of specific political intent—which is also of course a reading of the novel—to express not the elemental duplicity Hawthorne shares with his famously unreliable narrator; not his carving out of a space free from strictly “political” discourse from which he might offer a different caliber of nevertheless explicitly political commentary;3 not duplicity, masked intent, indirection, guarded but genuine contempt, or anything at all other than a frank avowal of broad agnosticism with respect to socialism and reform more generally, and a corollary desire to trace out the complexities of other sorts of questions and other sorts of dilemmas? What if the novel is precisely as described in the preface, holding in abeyance what are called “positions” with respect to the many vectors of contemporaneous politics that pass through it—the better, perhaps, to understand how such positions, dressed up in the guise of “theories” or “conclusions,” might themselves be duplicities, masks of a sort, vehicles for other species of fear or longing? If in what follows I do not accede wholly to the view that the novel expresses, with singular force, something like Hawthorne’s visionary conservativism, it is less because I think...

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