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

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

When Coverdale first enters the saloon, he takes "a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure" in the place (175). Indeed, he mounts a mild harangue against the temperance movement, which he argues "may preach till doom's day; and still this cold and barren world will look warmer, kindlier, mellower, through the medium of a toper's glass" (175). The passage establishes the terms for the epistemological crisis that ensues-the realist model of the paintings provides a counterpoint to Coverdale's conventional romantic mode. More particularly, it presages Coverdale's encounter with Moodie, which is mediated by a bottle of wine. Coverdale relies on the influence of fine claret to bring the shadowy Moodie "out into somewhat stronger relief" (179) and finds the man indeed transformed into a gentleman before his eyes, especially after Coverdale himself has "quaffed a glass or two" (181).

Figured as "a mere image, an optical delusion," the real Moody gets displaced in Coverdale's sentimental imagination by a romantic convention. His tongue loosened by fine wine, Moodie divulges the secret of Zenobia and Priscilla's shared past. Rather than report Moodie's narrative as told, Coverdale repackages the account as the tale of one Fauntleroy, told with "a trifle of romantic and legendary license, worthier of a small poet than of a grave biographer" (181). This striking gesture pointedly rejects the "perfectly imitated" reality of the oil paintings and squarely situates Coverdale's narration outside the "neutral territory" of Hawthorne's aesthetic compromise. In an effort to shore up his narrative position, Coverdale cedes whatever authority he has managed to retain. The reader is left without a yardstick to determine what is "real" and what the product of Coverdale's fancy. Coverdale finds in Moodie the prime subject for his sentimental narration. By divorcing the story of his past from Moodie the man, Coverdale reveals the mode of operation that has governed his narrative efforts from the beginning. Although Hollingsworth and Zenobia have proven to be less malleable subjects, Coverdale attempts that same kind of proprietary sympathy on them. It is important to note that his method in both instances essentially involves an act of seduction. His "poetic license" is not the licentiousness of Hollingsworth, whose actions toward himself, Zenobia, and Priscilla, Coverdale repeatedly and anxiously figures as acts of seduction. Hollingsworth makes his intentions known. Coverdale's behavior is, like Westerveldt's, surreptitious, at some level hidden even from himself. Coverdale's narrative seductions of Moodie are Hawthorne's means of revealing the dynamics of sympathetic extension in the sentimental mode.

The threat to self suggested by Coverdale's earlier encounter with Westerveldt receives especially elaborate and nuanced treatment in this scene. The meeting between Coverdale and Moodie echoes their prior encounter when Coverdale engages in the complex imaginative exercise of entering the old man's mind and imagining his own future from this other perspective. Coverdale identifies with Moodie as he looks over the Blithedale landscape through the old man's "smoke-blackened" eyes and sees a world "robbed ... of all its life" (84). He "takes [Moodie's] view" and determines to return to the very spot in old age to verify the accuracy of his perceptions. In other words, for Coverdale the exercise gives him a chance not to see the world through another man's eyes, but to imagine how the world will look through his own eyes when he is old like Moodie. As in this earlier scene, Coverdale's tale of Fauntleroy, the hollow man of wealth who squanders his means and reputation, represents the figure of Moodie as an extension of Coverdale himself, whose fate, like Fauntleroy's, was to "behold whatever he touched dissolve" (175). Moodie again becomes a "shadow," an "optical delusion," "impalpable." That this characterization is more applicable to Coverdale than to Moodie sheds its ambiguity and emerges as a "fact" in the final chapter of Blithedale when Moodie disappears from the narrative without account as Coverdale emerges from the shadows to displace him.