"Trading Places in Fancy": Hawthorne's Critique of Sympathetic Identification in The Blithedale Romance

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2003 by Christianson, Frank

I want to emphasize the fact that Coverdale's anxiety about and eventual antagonism toward Hollingsworth invariably focuses on his philanthropy. Indeed, Coverdale's preoccupation with Hollingsworth's mission even exceeds his obsession with Zenobia's sexuality.11 In Coverdale's mind, Hollingsworth is monstrous precisely because of his condition of professionalization. His "dreadful peculiarity" which makes him "not altogether human" is that he is one of "those men who have surrendered themselves to an over-ruling purpose" (70). Coverdale considers that purpose, professional philanthropy, insidious because its motive power is neither internal nor external to the community but "grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle" (70). Hollingsworth's monstrosity lies in his willingness to submit all forms of relation to the same utilitarian standard. Coverdale shrinks before Hollingsworth's promise to "direct" his friend's "peculiar faculties" so that "not one of them need lie idle" (133). No sphere of social relations can long remain inviolable before this instrumentalizing vision. Coverdale's strongest indictment figures Hollingsworth's public project as a conversion of the public into his own private sphere. He describes the philanthropist's ritual preoccupation with his projected edifice as he sits, "with a pencil and sheet of paper, sketching the facade, the side-view, or the rear of the structure, or planning the internal arrangements, as lovingly as another man might plan those of the projected home, where he meant to be happy with his wife and children" (56). The logical extension of this professionalizing impulse, according to Coverdale, is the paradoxical convergence of a "godlike benevolence" with an "all-devouring egotism" (71). Here, the narrator sees Hollingsworth displacing the domestic ideal with his philanthropic one much as he seeks to replace Blithedale's familial model of social relations with an institutional, corporate framework.

His antagonism toward Hollingsworth's professionalism reveals Coverdale's self-described status as a "minor poet" in a new light. At one point Hollingsworth refers to him as a "half-occupied man," and Coverdale responds by pointedly referring to the members of Blithedale as "amateurs." In Coverdale's world, philanthropy, like art, can only be an avocation that "render[s] life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, and insensibly influence[s] other hearts and other lives to the same blessed end" (243). This view of philanthropy marks an aesthetic divide between a genteel romanticism and a realism that aspires to a more functional identity with overt social aims. While the figure of Hollingsworth does not represent realism per se, I am suggesting his relationship to his work nevertheless points to an emerging social ethic running counter to the model of social relations on which Blithedale depends. Coverdale's understanding of the Blithedale model is thoroughly naive, as he calls attention to the relative youth of most community members: "Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this" (62). Hollingsworth's presence at Blithedale cancels out the romantic ideals of removal and separation to which the community aspires. He initiates what becomes a pervasive pattern of disclosures in which the appearance of change or transformation masks an underlying reality that is static and continuous with the "old world" and its modes of personal identity.