The structural difficulties of The Blithedale Romance have posed a persistent problem for critics seeking to come to terms with Nathaniel Hawthorne's most personal, and frequently most frustrating, novel. Though somewhat rescued in recent years from an undeserved reputation as a failed venture into autobiography and social criticism, the novel has still been considered on the formal level as little more than the "architectonic failure" one critic dubs it (Lefcowitz 275): its basic elements unassimilated into a coherent whole, and its final effect one of chaos rather than order. And such a criticism is at least partially just. The social level of the novel -- Hawthorne's criticism of the Brook Farm experiment -- is never fully assimilated into the larger fabric of the work, while certain episodes -- Zenobia's tale of the Veiled Lady being a good example -- seem only tangentially related to the material of the main narrative line. Even the style, which ranges from the Gothic portrait of the sinister Westervelt to the stark realism of Zenobia's death, scarcely seems of a piece. Yet, while the novel can, and undoubtedly should, be faulted on all these grounds, it is not, as too many of its critics have maintained, either formless or chaotic.

The Blithedale Romance follows a recognizable archetypal pattern which lends coherence to its events and relationships, and which generates a structural unity within an only apparently formless narrative. Through an understanding of this archetypal pattern we can see the way in which the novel succeeds structurally, and against that background we can evaluate the persistent stylistic problems which continue to plague the reader. Using the insights into literary structure offered by Freud, Jung, Kenneth Burke, Maud Bodkin and Ernest Jones, we can isolate the archetypal pattern which unifies the work with impressive artistry at the structural level, while still recognizing that serious flaws in style forbid any claims for the novel's total success. The structural success Hawthorne achieves, however, is not to be taken lightly, as it places The Blithedale Romance clearly within the great tradition of the Oedipal archetype and relates it within that tradition most particularly to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Generally the critics who have most successfully dealt with the structure of The Blithedale Romance are those who have approached the novel through either psychological or mythological analysis. Attuned to the psychological level at which the novel operates, their criticism has cast some important light upon the rich texture of the work, and they have rather conclusively demonstrated that this romance shares many of the psychological and mythological concerns which inform Hawthorne's other romances and tales. They have been less successful, however, in dealing with the unity of the work, tending instead to justify, sometimes ingeniously, its evident lack of form. Frederick Crews, for example, attempts to rationalize the formlessness of the work by comparing it to a dream. According to this reading, the book is "primarily concerned with Coverdale's mind" (Crews 169) and the episodes stand as a record of his attempt to create a romance from the events of the Blithedale experiment -- a process which closely resembles dreaming, and which shares the apparent chaos of dreams. Even more direct in asserting the relationship between novel and dream is Kelly Griffin, Jr., who describes the form of The Blithedale Romance as "an interior monologue, which represents the narrator's illogical thought processes and his attempt to shift events in his mind until he can settle on an arrangement satisfactory to himself" (16). This thought process gives us a structure, according to Griffin, in which the first half of the novel is essentially realistic, while the latter half is a "voyage through chaos -- mental chaos" (19) as represented in a series of dream episodes. In both cases, the chaotic effect of the novel is insisted upon, but justified by the implication that dreams deny order -- in art as well as in reality.

More successful in imposing order on the novel, though sometimes at the expense of sense, are those critics who have approached the work through myth. Peter B. Murray, for example, argues that "Coverdale's story and vision are based upon many of the same perceptions about life as are the Greek season myths, and he employs the actions, metaphors, and symbols of those myths to give his work its structure, to characterize his people, and to describe human relationships" (591). While Murray offers a persuasive case for a pattern of images and symbols which parallel such nature myths, his use of these factors to impose a structure on the work is less successful. To argue, as he does, that the novel progresses through the seasons is to say little more than that the work is chronological -- a description of order, certainly, but not necessarily of literary structure. A more questionable mythological reading is advanced by Hugo McPherson who asserts that, "as myth, the pattern of events ... suggests that Fauntleroy-Moodie is a kind of god, and that Hawthorne, as in the Pandora story, is conducting a special version of the Creation and the Fall" (591). The difficulty posed by this approach is that, while the reading does offer a sense of coherent structure in the novel, it does so by shifting the focus away from Coverdale and Hollingsworth -- who are the obvious central figures of the novel -- to concentrate upon Priscilla and Zenobia as the main characters. Reading the story basically in terms of Priscilla's evolution, McPherson sacrifices sense for symbol.

Despite the problems they pose, all of these readings have something to offer in terms of the structure of The Blithedale Romance. Seen as an archetypal pattern, the work itself is dreamlike in a larger sense than that suggested either by stream-of-consciousness or dream episodes. By approaching the novel at the level Kenneth Burke calls "poem as dream," and following his suggestion that "psychoanalytic coordinates" are required "to explain the logic of its structure" (285), we can explicate Hawthorne's romance by tracing the essential elements of its archetypal and dreamlike qualities. This is not to say, however, that we need necessarily to employ these psychological coordinates (as Frederick Crews has so effectively done in his The Sins of the Fathers) for a psychoanalytic study of the author himself. The archetypal motif intrinsic to the work universalizes individual experience and exists separately, if not independently, of its author. Again to quote Burke,

Only if we eliminate biography as a relevant fact about poetic organization can we eliminate the importance of the psychoanalyst's search for universal patterns of biography (as revealed in the search for basic myths which recur in new guises as a theme with variations); and we can eliminate biography as a relevant fact about poetic organization only if we consider the work of art as if it were written neither by people nor for people, involving neither inducements nor resistances. (278)

To suggest that The Blithedale Romance is related to Shakespeare's Hamlet would be absurd from the generic point of view, as the one is dramatic poetry and tragedy, while the other is a prose romance. However, even though the works are not related in terms of mode, they do share the same archetypal pattern. The very existence of an archetypal pattern in a work implies a structure, and the similarity of pattern in Hamlet and The Blithedale Romance relates them both structurally and in terms of their psychological implications, not, one quickly insists, because Hawthorne writes consciously or unconsciously in imitation of Shakespeare, but because the authors share the same ultimate psychological pattern in these two individual works.

The shared archetype of both Hamlet and The Blithedale Romance is the Oedipus legend, which represents, in its broadest application, "a highly elaborated and disguised account of a boy's love for his mother and consequent jealousy of and hatred towards his father" (Jones 162). Maud Bodkin even further generalizes the archetype to define it simply as "the conflict between generations" (15), whether as a conflict engendered by the child's sense of betrayal by the parents, or by the reverse situation we find in King Lear. In either case, an explication of The Blithedale Romance through the use of this pattern will show that this novel is solidly within the tradition of the conflict between generations; and that it shares with Hamlet not only the basic conflict between surrogate father and son, but a goodly number of character types and dramatic situations as well.

There are, first of all, some apparent surface similarities between these two works. The characters of Hamlet and Coverdale, counterpart figures in the Oedipal conflicts, are of about the same age (near 30) -- urbane, educated types of some innate sensitivity -- and they are both beset with a paralyzing inability to act. Claudius, the surrogate father in Hamlet, is roughly analogous to Hollingsworth, both in his position as powerful ruler and in his possession of the coveted female figure; and even Polonius, the "bad" or ineffectual father in Hamlet has his parallel in the form of Moodie. Zenobia and Priscilla are counterparts respectively to Hamlet's mother and Ophelia. One should note, however, that it is Zenobia, rather than Priscilla, who drowns herself on being rejected as a love-object in Hawthorne's novel, though this striking parallel seems to point up the similarity between the two works despite the shift in roles at this point. Finally, one might even add that Hawthorne's technique of having Zenobia usurp Coverdale's position as narrator to tell her tale of the Veiled Lady is similar enough to Shakespeare's play-within-a-play to add to the similitude between the works.

According to Freud's dream-work terminology, the situations cited above can be considered as similarities in the manifest content of the two works; but it is in the latent content -- i.e., in the symbolic and subconscious aspects -- that the most meaningful parallels occur. Both Shakespeare and Hawthorne use the technique of character "splitting," that is of using two separate figures to embody aspects of a single psychological idea, to represent the complexities of their separate treatments of the Oedipal archetype. It is through these split characters¹ that the ultimate similarity of the works can be discovered, because it is through the latent contents of their materials that both authors explore the archetypal patterns which give the works both meaning and structure.

Before exploring the covered dale of Hawthorne's Hamlet figure, we need first, through an explication of the psychological implications of the other characters, to establish the context in which he appears and functions. As Frederick Crews has pointed out, Coverdale's narration of the events of the Blithedale experiment "shows us the condition of a man in the grip of some private symbolism" (The Sins 197). One aspect of that private symbolism is the relationship Coverdale creates between himself and his fellow utopians; and, though "Coverdale himself has no clear idea of why Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla together are more meaningful to him than his relation to any one of them individually" (Crews, The Sins 201), we are under no such limitation. By exploring the archetypal pattern implicit in Coverdale's relationships, we can make the private symbolism of his mind more readily apparent.

The essence of the Oedipal conflict is expressed in the relationship between Miles Coverdale and Hollingsworth, his surrogate father. Even though he has only "three or four years the advantage" (Hawthorne 7) of Coverdale in age, Hollingsworth is presented throughout the novel as though he were an older man. Miles Coverdale himself sets this tone when, in his early scene with Moodie, he refers to Hollingsworth as an "older man" (7), while seeming to diminish his own adult years. Later Coverdale strengthens this point when he suggests that Hollingsworth "was then about thirty years old, but looked several years older, with his great shaggy head, his heavy brow, his dark complexion, his abundant beard, and the rude strength, with which his features seemed to have been hammered out of iron" (28). He is also referred to at least twice as resembling a bear, an image not uncommonly associated by Freud and others with dream-symbols for the father.

On the basis of this evidence, it would seem that Coverdale does regard, and relate to, Hollingsworth as an elder, and as a father image. The actual closeness in their ages, rather than detracting from the nature of the relationship, serves to heighten the sense of competition and conflict. Like Claudius and Hamlet, who Ernest Jones suggests should not be too widely separated in age, Hollingsworth and Coverdale are presented both as rivals and as distinct generations. Hollingsworth's qualities as a "reformer" and as the natural leader of the utopian community serve further to strengthen his image as a father figure. Symbolically, he becomes the tyrannical father who attempts to reform the basically anarchist nature of the child; and who rules the family domicile at his own whim. And, finally, there is Hollingsworth the possessor of both Zenobia and Priscilla (themselves a split mother-sister imago) who stands in the way of the son's fulfillment of his incestuous longing for the mother.

The function of the surrogate father is not, however, entirely centered in Hollingsworth. Just as one aspect of the father projection in Hamlet centers on Polonius, Coverdale's father image is divided between Hollingsworth and Moodie. The description Ernest Jones gives of Polonius in this context makes the similarity of these two figures apparent.

In the present legend it is probable that the figure of Polonius may be ... regarded as resulting from "decomposition" of the paternal archetype, representing a certain group of qualities which the young not infrequently find an irritating feature in their elders. The senile babbler, concealed behind a show of fussy pomposity, who has a rare capacity to bore his audience with the repetition of sententious platitudes.... (154)

Through the women of the novel, a mother-sister imago is incorporated into the figures of Priscilla and Zenobia who represent Coverdale's

splitting of the mother image which the infantile unconscious effects into two opposite pictures: one a virginal Madonna, an inaccessible saint towards whom all sensual approaches are unthinkable, and the other of a creature accessible to everyone. (Jones 90)

The most immediate evidence of the two women as a composite mother image is the simple fact that they both are related closely to the father figures, Hollingsworth and Moodie. In their relationship to Hollingsworth, they both actually become wives -- Priscilla with benefit of clergy as is appropriate to her purity, and Zenobia as a wife in fact ["the gossip of the community set them down as a pair of lovers" (79)] though not in law. In a poignant scene of rebirth, Coverdale imagines himself as the son in relation to the triangle of Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla. Several times during his illness after arriving at Blithedale, Coverdale senses the approach of death and feels a return to life. The rebirth image implicit in these references is finally made overt in Coverdale's comment on his recovery:

My fit of illness had been an avenue between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through which I crept out of a life of old conventianalisms, on my hands and knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond. In this respect it was like death. And, as with death, too, it was good to have gone through it. (61)

The train of thoughts which, for months past, had worn a track through my mind, and to escape which was one of my chief objects in leaving Blithedale, kept treading remorselessly to-and-fro, in their old footsteps, while slumber left me impotent to regulate them. It was not till I quitted my three friends that they first began to encroach upon my dreams. In those of the last night, Hollingsworth and Zenobia, standing on either side of my bed, had bent across it to exchange a kiss of passion. Priscilla, beholding this -- for she seemed to be peeping in at the chamber-window -- had melted gradually away, and left only the sadness of her expression in my heart. (153)²

without his being in the least aware of it these ancient desires are ringing in his mind, are ... struggling to find conscious expression, and need such an expenditure of energy ... to "repress" them that he is reduced to the deplorable state he ... so vividly depicts. (Jones 94)

If ... the "repression" is considerable, then the hostility will be correspondingly concealed from consciousness; this is often accompanied by the develomment of an opposite sentiment, namely an exaggerated regard and respect for him, and a morbid solicitude for his welfare, which completely covers the underlying relationship. (90)

Even by leaving Blithedale, Coverdale does not overcome his fixation; he merely absents himself from its physical environment. The aimless existence he leads during the years after Blithedale, as well as his continuing bachelorhood, are indications of his continued suppressed animosity toward Hollingsworth, and his desire for the mother imago -- a desire which eventually comes to rest in his "love" of the virginal Priscilla. The effect of Coverdale's desire for Priscilla, a situation of which he at least seems aware though he cannot verbalize it until she is safely married to Hollingsworth, is explained by the fact that

if the awakened passion [for the mother] undergoes an insufficient "repression" then the boy may remain throughout life abnormally attached to his mother and unable to love any other woman, a not uncommon cause of bachelorhood. (Jones 88)

It is through Coverdale's spying that we come to a final major element of the novel which must be considered in treating Hawthorne's romance as an Oedipal archetype. While spying from his tree, Coverdale discovers Westervelt, the dark, mysterious villain of the piece, and, in Jungian terms, a shadow of Coverdale's psyche. Leslie Fiedler has suggested that "the dark and utterly damned hypnotist Westervelt" is the "alter ego" of Hollingsworth (65), but this seems to me inconsistent with the pattern of relationships in the work. Jung defines the shadow archetype as the personification of the dark, subconscious desires of the persona which is normally presented to public view. In this relationship, it seems more reasonable that Westervelt is a projection of Coverdale's qualities, that is of his incestuous longings, than he is of Hollingsworth who does not suffer from this conflict. The very fact that we most often see Westervelt through the spying activities of Coverdale almost suggests the dark man as an actual creation of the poet's imagination; but, in reality, he is another example of Hawthorne's use of the split character. As a shadow image of Coverdale, Westervelt is an objectification of the most deeply repressed impulses of the Oedipal wish. He puts into action the fantasies Coverdale cannot even allow himself to admit, and, in so doing, he demonstrates the intensity of Coverdale's hidden drives.

In his capacity as shadow, it is Westervelt who debauches the sensual Zenobia, and who, for a time, controls the very existence of Priscilla. The fact that he finally loses them both to Hollingsworth is consistent with the theory that Westervelt is Coverdale's shadow, since the father must ultimately win in the struggle between father and son for possession of the mother figures. This, it seems to me, helps to explain why Westervelt is so poorly developed as a character -- in contrast to the more fully drawn figures in the novel. As a shadow figure, he exists in the same relationship to Coverdale as Moodie does to Hollingsworth. Though neither of these figures serve the needs of the novel as well as they might, both adequately fulfill their roles in Hawthorne's archetypal pattern. Each of them represents a different aspect -- the "dark" or undesirable side -- of the persona to whom he is related.

In concentrating on the male figures in the novel, we have thus far given little attention to Zenobia and Priscilla as characters in their own right, but not because they are unrelated, or only passively related, to the Oedipal pattern. Zenobia's legend, in particular, has a close relationship to Coverdale's psychological problem, though, as it is told from the woman's point-of-view, it approaches on a tack opposite to that of the passages narrated by Coverdale himself. The tale of the Veiled Lady is partially a thinly disguised version o£ the legend of Sleeping Beauty, an archetype of awakening female sexuality. As such, it has intrinsic meaning beyond its relationship to the Oedipal pattern of the novel, but we need consider it here only as it relates to that pattern.

In Zenobia's tale, we have, first of all, a confusion, or a uniting perhaps, of the figure of the prince, the son, who must kiss through the veil -- symbolic of gentle seduction -- and the husband or father who will rip the veil away in a symbolic rape. This suggests the attitude of the mother and her contribution to the son's Oedipal feelings by her idealization of him as a love-object. At the same time, she regards the husband as aggressive, violent, and un-idealized -- the manifestation of all the worst male tendencies. The tale also reflects Zenobia's function as the unincorporated sensual shadow of Priscilla's sexually repressed nature. In telling the tale, Zenobia makes Priscilla its heroine and ultimate victim, symbolizing her own resentment at being excluded from the psyche. It is precisely because her place in the psyche is denied her that she ultimately drowns herself, while Priscilla enters into a sterile marriage with Hollingsworth. In this sense, both Hollingsworth and Coverdale are finally failures in their relationships with the women of the novel, as neither of them can accept the full-blooded womanliness of Zenobia. Each instead focuses his desires on the pallid, sexless Priscilla -- the image, in Jones's terms, of the "virginal Madonna."

Returning to the similarities between Shakespeare's Hamlet and Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, I once again quote Jones to emphasize the remarkable correspondences in the archetypal patterns of these two works as revealed by their effects upon Hamlet and Coverdale. What Jones writes here of Hamlet can be read as an accurate summary of Coverdale's psychological condition, and of Hawthorne's psychological theme:

Action is paralyzed at its very inception, and there is produced the picture of apparently causeless inhibition which is so inexplicable...to readers.... This paralysis arises, however, not from physical or moral cowardice, but from that intellectual cowardice, that reluctance to dare the exploration of his inmost soul which Hamlet shares with the rest of the human race. "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." (103)

¹ Both Lefcowitz and Murray comment on Zenobia and Priscilla as a split or composite character. The former's argument that Priscilla's past included prostitution, however, seems inconsistent with the sensual-saintly aspects of the two characters. Murray's view of them as simply "two aspects of the feminine personality" (593) is closer to my own reading.

² Crews writes of this passage, "the reader who doubts that Coverdale has unconsciously cast himself as a son must wonder why this dream depicts Hollingsworth and Zenobia in the unorthodox erotic pose of bending across Coverdale's bed. And all readers must surely note the moral ambiguity of the wish expressed in the dream. Priscilla is meant to be disillusioned by the sexual passion which she has discovered in her elders, yet Coverdale's own intentions toward her, as we later discern, are those of a lover" (The Sins 204).

³ Coverdale's aggressive impulses at this point are diverted into a burst of energy so powerful that he says, "I lifted stones which, at this day -- or, in a calmer mood, at that one -- I should no more thought it possible to stir, than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my back" (136).

⁴ See Jones (166-169) for a fuller discussion of the psychological implications of such spying.

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Burke, Kenneth. "Freud and the Analysis of Poetry." The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge: 1967.

Crews, Frederick C. "A New Reading of The Blithedale Romance." American Literature 29 (1957): 169.

---. The Sins of the Fathers. NY: 1966.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in thc American Novel. NY: 1960.

Griffin, Kelley, Jr. "Form in The Blithedale Romance." American Literature 40 (1968): 16-19.

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