I've had a really difficult time making sense of Hawthorne's comments in the preface to The Blithedale Romance. Specifically the portion where he attempts to convince the reader that Brook Farm serves as nothing more than a stage for the characters that he invented. I've been back and forth about what Hawthorne's intentions were.
Initially I took the statement at face value. That Hawthorne honestly didn't use Brook Farm as anything other than what he described. From that I inferred that there would be few if any similarities between the characters of the book and the people of Brook Farm. I figured since there wasn't likely to be much overlap that I could use my research paper to expand on the areas where there were similarities. Natalia was first to point out on my proposal that this was probably not the best way to go because there were so many similarities between the two.
After I started researching I was surprised just how many possible similarities there were between the people of Brook Farm and the characters from the novel. So I was forced to alter my perception of what Hawthorne's intent was in the preface of the novel. Suddenly I felt like I was being lied to. That he obviously wrote his characters with specific models in mind. I figured the comments in the preface were nothing more than him covering himself because he was concerned about backlash from the people he had modeled his characters on.
Then after doing more research, I discovered a few conflicting accounts about the relationship between the people and the characters. I read many contradictory opinions of what character was based on what person, or what event was the inspiration for what part of the novel and I came to a new conclusion. That there really is no connection between the people of the novel and the people of Brook Farm, just as Hawthorne stated. I realized that regardless of what the characters of the novel were like it would be possible to map them to people at Brook Farm. I think it would even be possible to find similarities between the people at Brook Farm and the characters of any novel. So maybe Hawthorne wasn't being dishonest at all. Maybe the similarities are nothing more than coincidence and no matter what Hawthorne did people would do everything they could to come up with a reason why this character was based on that person. After all...it sure makes for a good research paper topic!
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2 comments:
Ha yah it seem like parallels could be drawn between the characters and dozens of people. A lot of the stuff that I have read don't even try to deal with it at all.
My opinion is that Hawthorne was not being entirely honest in his preface, that he did use it as a cover-up, and that at least Coverdale is based on himself. It is too much a coincedence for me that Hawthorne chose a first-person narrator who has personality traits so similar to his, who shares the same experiences as him, and who is a romance writer like him. Hawthorne must have poured at least part of himself into Coverdale, which is exactly what I am proving in my research paper.
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