The Blithedale Romance
Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Rebecca Cantrell
Narrated by Jonathan Fried
3/5
()
About this audiobook
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an American writer whose work was aligned with the Romantic movement. Much of his output, primarily set in New England, was based on his anti-puritan views. He is a highly regarded writer of short stories, yet his best-known works are his novels, including The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of Seven Gables (1851), and The Marble Faun (1860). Much of his work features complex and strong female characters and offers deep psychological insights into human morality and social constraints.
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Reviews for The Blithedale Romance
6 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this story. It has very interesting scenes of life at that time, both urban and rural. It shows the struggles one faces when trying to go one's own way. The women have excellent roles, and there is much honesty in the way the material is presented. This is some of Hawthorne's best work.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My favorite Hawthorne. A roman a clef about Brook Farm, the failed Transcendental communal experiment.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5One of the worst novels I've read in a while- the plot is contrived, the prose is overdone, characters not as interesting as first appeared, etc. I expected the utopian community angle would make it intersting, but it doesn't play a very central part in the plot (or I didn't think so). At least it was short ...
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5857 The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (read 4 June 1966) I did no post-reading note so all I can say is that I did not enjoy the book much, thinking it not very impressive. Wikipedia has an article on the book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5After reading “The Scarlet Letter” years ago in school, and now “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Blithedale Romance” in relatively close conjunction, there seems to be a common theme running throughout much of Hawthorne’s longer fiction: namely, the deep and abiding mistrust in ideas of utopia, progress or perfectibility, especially of the human kind. Hawthorne came from a long line of Puritans, one of whom even presided over some of the Salem witch trials. Now writing on the cusp of the Civil War, he feels the renewed need for the kind of pragmatic skepticism which, one generation later, an entire generation of American philosophers will call for.Coverdale, the naïve narrator in search of an agrarian source of truth, discovers Blithedale (the name itself should set off bells of suspicion), a community built around the ideals of Fourier, the utopian French social theorist. Fourier thought that life could be optimized through a kind of rationalistic social engineering, the basic living unit of which he called the “phalanstere.” The hilarious (hilarious in that subtle, dowdy, Puritan way that was uniquely Hawthorne’s) part is that, once everyone in Blithedale is introduced into the mix, tensions, different ideas, passions, and ideologies start to bubble to the surface showing just what a pipedream Fourier’s utopia really is. Hawthorne’s point seems to be that holding rationality primary over contingency and human emotion is shortsighted and silly. Not only is Blithedale a folly, but the very idea of a utopia is a sheer impossibility. I’m sure that Hawthorne would have us remember the clever lesson from Thomas More’s “Utopia” – that it means, quite literally, “no place.” I’ll forego a lot of the plot details because I read this several months ago, and wouldn’t be able to do them justice without re-reading it. What I have unpacked here is just what jumped out at me the most. There is a strange woman named Zenobia who always wears a fresh flower in her hair, who turns out being the half-sister of a Blithedale foundling named Priscilla. The novel culminates in a set of philosophical disagreements between Coverdale and Hollingsworth, the ironically patriarchal figure whose presence hangs over Blithedale. I found the plot somewhat contrived and unrealistic, even for Hawthorne, but still very much worthwhile. The action is based on Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm, a well-known utopian community in its own right, where he spent most of 1841, largely in an effort to save money for his marriage. He would marry Sophia Peabody (of the famous Peabody sisters) in July of the next year.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Story of a group of town men and women that decided to go work at a farm and live the simple life. Twist in the relationship of the leading women. Narrator seems to be a rather boring yet nosy poet. Surprise ending. Great last line.