Socialism and Utopia in The Blithedale Romance

My research proposal is concerned with the way in which 19th century concerns with socialism and utopianism impacted The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne appears to criticize both of these ideas in the book through the creation of an array of characters who, although superficially committed to the cause of their community, fall short in successfully establishing Blithedale due to their own personal interests. I hope that gaining some insight into the historical context surrounding the novel will help to explain why he depicted the community as he did. I'm taking a couple directions with the topic at this point, as I'm not entirely sure what will be relevant to the paper.

I'm using Brook Farm as an obvious starting point for research. Importantly there's the connection with Hawthorne himself, which should allow for more insight into the philosophical underpinnings of the book than would be accomplished by pursuing general research into 19th century socialism/utopianism. This has led me to some of the ideas associated with Brook Farm- Transcendentalism and Fourierism. At this point I intend to draw the connection between those ideas, Hawthorne himself, and by proxy the situation he described at Blithedale. Biographical readings about Hawthorne, historical accounts of Brook Farm, and descriptions of the philosophies associated with the Brook Farm experiment may all be useful.

Besides using historical sources which describe and its associated ideologies, I’m also exploring literary criticism to see how others saw the association between The Blithedale Romance and socialism/utopianism. It’s not always clear how to place a novel within a specific school of thought, so I think by looking for experts on the matter I can more easily see how specific ideas within 19th century socialism or utopianism may have influenced the novel.

At this point my research is rather broad in scope, as I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be arguing. I assume it’ll become clearer in the days ahead, as I still have a lot of material to absorb before I can clearly formulate a thesis (and therefore have a good idea of what type of material I should be looking at).