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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
There is no need to compile a list of past criticism to make the case that The Blithedale Romance is a fiction which has given rise to a remarkable number of interpretations and evaluations (even if judged by the strikingly high standards set by over a century of Hawthorne criticism). The text's concern with fluidity and its questionings of authoritative explanation have not made it any easier for a critical consensus to emerge.
The Blithedale Romance, I am going to suggest, may usefully be approached by looking at the ways it foregrounds the question of the difficulties of description and the (inevitably) related problems of interpretation — by beginning from the juxtaposition of two names (Coverdale and Fauntleroy) and a recognition of what those names so contrastingly and problematically signify: translation and forgery. Among the dictionary definitions given for “to translate” are: to interpret, to explain, to change, to transform. Among those for “ to forge ” are: to pretend something to have happened, to make something in fraudulent imitation of something else, to make or devise something spurious.
1 I have used the excellent Norton critical edition edited by Seymour Gross and Rosalie Murphy (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978). They have used the text of the centenary edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne published by the Ohio State University Press. Because of the numerous editions available of The Blithedale Romance, I have given chapter rather than page references, and these are placed parenthetically in the text.
2 Reid, J. C., Bucks and Bruisers: Pierce Egan and Regencgy England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 123Google Scholar. Since writing this, I have found that, alas, this identification is not original. George Parsons Lathrop, in his introductory note to the Riverside edition of the novel writes “The name Fauntleroy… was probably borrowed from that banker, whose forgeries, prosecuted by the Bank of England and leading to his execution, made him a distinguished character in criminal history, about the year 1824, while Hawthorne was still a Bowdoin undergraduate” (5, 317). I have earlier argued the case for identifying Fauntleroy's crime as forgery in “A Note on The Blithedale Romance or, ‘Call him Fauntleroy’” (Journal of American Studies, 10 (1976), 1, 103–04)Google Scholar. Without repeating the article, I want to emphasize that Coverdale stresses that he chooses this very unusual name for “a man of wealth, and magnificant tastes, and prodigal expenditure,” and that Fauntleroy's case was very widely reported – it was, for example, written up in The Gentleman's Magazine which we know Hawthorne read. Though knowledge of the historical Fauntleroy makes it certain that forgery is the crime of the fictional Fauntleroy, I would argue that this can be gathered from a careful reading of the text.
3 The relation of The Blithedale Romance to the historical world is difficult and complex (and I do not mean simply the relationship to Brook Farm). Take, for example, the tactless – even tasteless – “fact” that Coverdale receives a letter from Margaret Fuller. She had died only in 1850 and her autobiography with memoirs by Emerson and others appeared in 1852 – the same year as the publication of the The Blithedale Romance. And Coverdale reinforces the impression that he can be considered as an historical personage by mentioning in the last chapter that Rufus Griswold (1815–57), the compiler of The Poets and Poetry of America, had placed him at a “fair elevation among our minor minstelsy.” Such an appearance of real historical personages is common enough in conventional historical fiction produced in the nineteenth century but it is surely decidedly odd in a novel which (as the preface makes clear) comes from and is partly addressed to a small, even provincial society and where the action takes place only a dozen or so years before the time of writing.
4 That rock, Eliot's pulpit, was “so named from a tradition that the venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there… to an Indian auditory” (Ch. 14). He was known as “Apostle” because he preached to the Indians in their own language and also translated the Bible. It is hard to believe that Hawthorne chose the site lightly.
5 Male, R. R., Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1964, first published by the University of Texas Press, 1957), p. 154Google Scholar; Magretta, Joan, “The Coverdale Translation: Blithedale and the Bible” (Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, 1974), p. 242Google Scholar.
6 Steiner, T. R., English Translation Theory 1650–1800 (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975)Google Scholar.
7 Basnett-McGuire, Susan, Translation Studies (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), pp. 39, 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Kelly, paraphrasing George Steiner in After Babel, notes that the hermeneutic process of translation has four stages: trust, aggression, incorporation and restitution. However coincidentally, this is not a bad description of Coverdale's narrative. Kelly, L. G., The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). p. 56Google Scholar.
9 Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 2, 106Google Scholar. Even closer to Coverdale's words is a sentence from John Holliday's Life of Lord Mansfield (1797), quoted in Albion's Fatal Tree (p. 19, Peregrine edition): “Forgery is a stab to commerce, and only to be tolerated in a commercial nation when the foul crime of murder is pardoned.”
10 Francis, Richard, “The Ideology of Brook Farm,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, 1977, ed. Myerson, Joel (Boston: Twayne), pp. 14, 15Google Scholar.
11 Jameson, F., The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981)Google Scholar, passim.
12 Schlegel, A. W., A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. by Black, John (London: Henry G. Bohn, first published in 1811, 1846), pp. 54, 70Google Scholar.
13 Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Surveys from Exile edited and introduced by Fernbach, David, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp 146–47Google Scholar.
14 Eagleton, T. F., “Translation and Transformation”, Stand, 19 (1978), 73Google Scholar.
