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

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

Although Coverdale represents himself as uniquely adept at entering other people's consciousnesses, he is also singularly susceptible to external influences. Early in the narrative, Coverdale imagines that his sickness has left him vulnerable: "Zenobia's sphere ... impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed me, during this period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical clairvoyant" (46-47). While the upshot of this proximity to Zenobia is a fantasy about her sexual past that both titillates and repels him, the pattern that this episode introduces shows itself to have more far-reaching consequences. In the hermitage scene, Coverdale suddenly comes under a "sensual influence" that renders him unable to believe in "moral beauty or heroism" and he is convinced of "the folly of attempting to benefit the world" (100). he looks out upon the Blithedale experiment and concludes, "At my height above the earth, the whole matter looks ridiculous!" (100). Coverdale's transformation to a skeptic makes clear the troubled position he occupies as a narrator. he submits to an unwonted sympathy with Westervelt whom he has just encountered in the woods and he blames the magician's diabolical influence for his loss of faith: "...it was through his eyes, more than my own, that I was looking" (101). Coverdale's ideal of impartial spectatorship receives a fatal blow when he gets his channels crossed and finds himself alienated from his peers. If, as Coverdale claims, he is the victim of a kind of sympathetic possession that results in his failure to identify, then sympathy itself puts the lie to the moral legitimacy of his position as sympathetic narrator. The irony of Coverdale ceding control of his proprietary gaze to another is compounded by the fact that this supposed transfer of authority occurs in the midst of a ritualized act of identification in the romantic vein.

The appropriation of the other and the potential loss of self as consequences of sympathetic extension are developed to the full in the saloon scene. Coverdale goes seeking information from Old Moodie. As he sits waiting for his acquaintance, he notices that the establishment is "fitted up with a good deal of taste" (175). As evidence, the narrator addresses a series of realistic still-life oil paintings upon the walls. Each successive image reproduces the food from the menu with ever-greater fidelity that inspires Coverdale to compare theirs to the "accuracy of a daguerreotype" (176). Consumed by these images, his eyes rest on a depiction of a drunken man that brings him up short: "The death-in-life was too well portrayed. You smelt the fumy liquor that had brought on this syncope. Your only comfort lay in the forced reflection, that, real as he looked, the poor caitiff was but imaginary, a bit of painted canvass, whom no delirium tremens, nor so much as a retributive headache, awaited, on the morrow" (176). Unnerved by the hyperrealism of the paintings, Coverdale turns to the ostensible source of narrative truth, Mr. Moodie. According to Coverdale, his real-life acquaintance "looked so colorless and torpid-so very faintly shadowed on the canvass of reality-that I was half afraid lest he should altogether disappear, even while my eyes were fixed full upon his figure" (179). Against the vivid "canvas" of realism Moodie becomes a mere silhouette presenting the reader with an epistemological paradox.