The Link Between Hawthorne and Coverdale

In trying to determine how Hawthorne relates to his first-person narrator, Coverdale, I came across two primary connections:

1. (My own opinion:) Hawthorne and Coverdale share similar personalities and experiences, but Coverdale’s are exaggerated versions of Hawthorne’s. This suggests Hawthorne is examining himself through Coverdale.

2. (A few critics’ opinion:) Hawthorne and Coverdale are both authors and storytellers. Through Coverdale, Hawthorne analyzes the art of romance writing and how someone can gain access to others’ minds.

Because I have to come up with an original argument, I have been struggling to figure out how to incorporate my idea (1) with the critics’ idea that I agree with (2). I have decided the fact that Hawthorne and Coverdale are both authors is just more evidence that they share similar experiences, that Hawthorne is exploring his own personality and life.

While at Brook Farm, Hawthorne spent much of his spare time in isolation, either in his room or on a quiet walk, which he had hoped to use to write but was unable to out of physical exhaustion. Coverdale struggles from a similar desire to do poetry while at Blithedale without success. Both decide to narrate their experiences at their respective socialist communities years after, with Hawthorne reflecting on Brook Farm in The Blithedale Romance through Coverdale reflecting on Blithedale. It seems that, by making Coverdale an author like himself, Hawthorne can finally culminate all of his observations of life at Brook Farm into a narrative without doing it directly autobiographically. Essentially, Hawthorne has Coverdale be an “author” as an excuse to analyze his observations of Brook Farm.

Thus, my research paper presents the following argument:

Hawthorne and his narrator Coverdale have similar personalities (self-absorbed, quiet, and reclusive), similar life experiences (both live in Socialist communities and Hawthorne uses his experiences at Brook Farm directly in his novel), and similar authorial struggles (both are romance writers trying to pry into others’ lives and both find they only have time to write about their narrative-inspiring experiences at Brook Farm / Blithedale after leaving). Thus, Hawthorne puts much of himself into his narrator and uses first-person narration as a tool with which he can examine himself. After doing so, Hawthorne becomes self-conscious of his connection with his narrator, and a month after “finishing” the novel, he attempts to cover up his relation to Coverdale by adding a preface that states Coverdale is fictitious and a concluding chapter that portrays Coverdale as ridiculous. Finally, the connection between Hawthorne and Coverdale explains Coverdale’s personality and imaginative wanderings, his attempts to understand the other characters’ “hidden” relationships, and why he suddenly professes love to Priscilla.