Nobody's Protest Novel: Art and Politics in the Blithedale Romance

Of course it's only an accident that Hawthorne's most suggestively political novel was published same year as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Yet it seems significant that, though Blithedale made Melville even more envious of Hawthorne's popular success, it was Stowe novel that became runaway best seller. Significant, too, that her work has found its way into modern canon for reasons that have much to do with questions of race and gender. Within certain limits, sharply outlined in a famous essay James Baldwin, Uncle Tom's Cabin knows very well what it is about: chattel slavery is an unmitigated evil which must be ended; this will happen only when men become more like women--more Christian and, in sense we now more readily accept, more sentimental. Baldwin may well be right in asserting that Mrs. Stowe does not really understand and indeed is fundamentally afraid of black people, but she knows her occasion and her audience. She could hardly have written a more popular work if she set out to do no more than sell books. And it remains Everybody's Protest Novel. (1) By contrast, and from precisely same political moment, The Blithedale Romance (1852) seems not entirely clear about what it is for. It certainly entertains urgent question of woman in nineteenth century, and it may refract Compromise of 1850 even more pointedly than does The Scarlet Letter; but it makes no very overt reference to increasingly volatile question of race slavery; and indeed its drama, set in a theater at some remove from ordinary life, seems so painfully interpersonal as to be, in some fundamental sense, pre-political. It may easily be thought to recoup or to repent Hawthorne's nine-month stay at Brook Farm in 1841; and no doubt novel could not have been written without that rare personal stimulus. But cast of fictional characters is so different from that of life experience that even most ingenious attempts at reading roman a clef have fallen flat, just as Hawthorne predicted they would. (2) Nor does Blithedale appear to attack communitarian movement as such: Coverdale sounds--for him--convincingly thematic when in retrospect he muses that his odd little cohort had struck upon what ought to be a truth, one which Posterity might dig up, and profit by (3:245-46).3 We may well wonder why Hawthorne, who pondered, all his shy and private life, limit-question of lonely self-enclosure, did not somewhere imagine a practical alternative. Yet book reads nothing like a utopian tract; and indeed its Preface is never more convincing than when it disavows, most generally, the slightest pretensions to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion ... in respect to Socialism (3:1). The capitalization emphasizes a scorn of political discourse perfectly Jamesian. Swarming agents of correctness care little enough for such questions of taste, of course, but problem of genre remains: an art-novel if there ever was one, The Blithedale Romance presents a morale nothing like that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The problem is, above all, narration. Mrs. Stowe--or whatever we decide to call voice that tells tale that turned tide of Northern sentiment--speaks to us directly, more directly than Whitman, even, in a poem that insists we let his dark patches fall on us as well. Hers is not a literary strategy disguised as natural speech and designed to assure us of identity of reader and writer in Unity of Soul. It is a plea from person to person. What Stowe wants to say is something like this: you, cautious and comfortable reader, whoever you are, are complicit in worst crime against humanity American Republic has so far to show; take sufferings and death of Uncle Tom as a fair example. Let fictional representation, drawn from sternest reality, change your mind and heart; then do whatever else you can to change world in this regard. …