Although I am not completely sure exactly what I want to research, my central question is how does Hawthorne’s narrator in The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale, compare to Hawthorne himself? I mainly want to find out why Hawthorne chose Coverdale to be his first-person narrator, what effect it has on the story, and whether Coverdale at Blithedale is Hawthorne at Brook Farm.
I have been reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal lately, and have found some interesting entries that relate to my research.
First I looked up his journal entries from around the time he was working on The Blithedale Romance (early 1850s). He writes, “Wrote the last page (199th MS.) of ‘The Blithedale Romance’” on April 13, 1852. On May 1, he adds “Wrote Preface. Afterwards modified the conclusion, and lengthened it to 201 pages.” (Arvin, Newton, ed. The Heart of Hawthorne's Journals. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929.)
These entries suggest two things. One, the preface (which explains that the novel does not reflect his opinion of Brook Farm) appears to be an afterthought. Two, perhaps he added the chapter “Miles Coverdale’s Confessions” three weeks after he considered the novel finished. The preface and the last chapter seem to be crucial to the novel’s meaning, at least to me, so it is puzzling to find that he added them after finishing the book. Maybe the novel is more attached to his Brook Farm experiences than previously thought; maybe Hawthorne added the last chapter to disconnect himself with Coverdale because he felt the character appeared too similar to him throughout the book. I will have to look more deeply into it.
I then found a passage from September 7, 1850, that reads almost identically to a passage near the end of The Blithedale Romance. I will not quote the entire journal entry, but it is a less refined version of what is found on page 211 in The Blithedale Romance, beginning with “In my haste, I stumbled over a heap of logs.” It is interesting to note that in his journal, Hawthorne uses first person to represent himself as stumbling over the logs, whereas in The Blithedale Romance, he uses first person to mean Coverdale stumbles over the logs. I will need to analyze the passage more and hypothesize why Hawthorne would deem it necessary to include in his novel.
Next I looked up journal entries from when Hawthorne was at Brook Farm (they turned out to be letters instead of journal entries). Apparently Hawthorne was sick when he first arrived at Brook Farm like Coverdale, and he absolutely hated all of the manual labor he had to do on the farm, leaving shortly after joining. Like Coverdale, he complains about how he does not have time to write because he is constantly exhausted from working. He seems very similar to Coverdale in these letters.
I have only scratched the surface of similarities between Hawthorne and Coverdale; I hope to delve deeper into his journal, his letters, and biographies about him to discover how he relates to his character Coverdale, as well as more closely look at what I have already found.
3 comments:
It sounds like you've got a good start. If minor details like those of his experience at Brook Farm are replicated in The Blithedale Romance, it is suggestive that Coverdale and the themes of the novel may not be very far off from reflecting what he felt about their community.
That bit about stumbling over the logs is an awesome find, Wesley. It's another one of those weird invocations of ghosts, but unlike the moments when Coverdale sees his living friends as ghosts, a physical feature of the land makes him imagine its former inhabitants coming to life. He's a big seer of ghosts, that Coverdale.
Very cool research. This seems like an intriguing topic - Coverdale is such a...weird character. You probably already know, but this was the only novel where Hawthorne used a first person narrator...which seems to show a lot of significance whether Coverdale is similar to Hawthorne or not. Nice job on going into logs - I think researching into the preface/last chapter will give a lot of insight into why Hawthorne portrayed Coverdale as he did.
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