Annotated Bibliography

Autrey, Max L.  “Flower Imagery in Hawthorne’s Posthumous Narratives.”  Studies in the Novel 7 (1975): 215-26.  Through this article, Autrey discusses what he considers to be Hawthorne’s favorite literary analogy: man and plant.  The main focus of the argument is centered around Hawthorne’s tendency to uphold utility over beauty within his narratives (215).  “Hawthorne explains that the loss of Eden, and the consequent loss of eternal youth and beauty, makes it mandatory that emphasis be placed on utility instead of beauty in reference to man and also plant life…he consistently describes the development of man in terms of the seasonal cycle of vegetation and assesses his usefulness through a comparison with the service and produce of plants” (216).

Bales, Kent.  “The Allegory and the Radical Romantic Ethic of The Blithedale Romance.”  American Literature 46.1 (1974): 41-53.  Bales explores the value of Hawthorne’s allegories.  He argues against those who see allegory as evasive of unacceptable human truths and impulses.  In addition he disagrees with critics who see allegorists as mere rhetoricians or debaters forming arguments.  Bales claims: “On the contrary, allegory is a mode of apprehension and expression well suited to ambiguous and mysterious material, perhaps best suited of all to exploring the human mind and the ambivalences that are so typical of it” (41).  While many critics have asserted that the allegory found in The Blithedale Romance as a novelty used to show Coverdale’s bad faith or unreliability, Bales believes that Blithedale’s image of woman creates an allegory that shows “Hawthorne’s veiled tender of good faith”  (44).  He looks closely at both Nature and Spirit as personified in Zenobia and Priscilla.

Fleischner, Jennifer.  “Female Eroticism, Confession, and Interpretation in Nathaniel Hawthorne.”  Nineteenth-Century Literature 44.4 (1990): 514-33.  Central to this article is sex and female eroticism in Hawthorne’s fiction.  An interesting idea that Fleischner develops is that it is the idealized form of woman, as seen in Faith, Priscilla, and Hilda “that proves lethal” (516).  She sees that when certain male characters “cast off the eroticized female in order to embrace the idealized one,” they lose touch with experience, which, to Fleischner, spells the end of interpretation—“the end of the male artist’s capacity for production” (516).  Fleischner also asserts that each of these male characters is faced with a split; their natural, sexual desires are with the natural woman, such as Zenobia, but their confessions confirm the opposite, that they really love the spiritual woman—the perfectly airy and idealized one (517).

Grossberg, Benjamin S.  “’The Tender Passion Was Very Rife Among Us’: Coverdale’s Queer Utopia and The Blithedale Romance.  Studies in American Fiction 28.1 (2000): 3-25.  “To what can we attribute the failure of the Blithedale experiment” (3)?  This is the question that drives Grossberg’s argument.  In fact, he believes that most readers will and must ask this very same question.  He examines and rejects arguments of others in order to finally reach his own conclusion, that the problem is the community members’ failure to agree on a unified vision.  Tied to this is the “inability to find concert within themselves” (23).  One of the more interesting arguments Grossberg pushes is that of gender development of each of the four main characters.  He shows Zenobia and Coverdale to become more and more characteristically masculine, or, perhaps independent, throughout the book and Hollingsworth and Priscilla to develop toward being more feminine.

Kloeckner, Alfred J.  “The Flower and the Fountain: Hawthorne’s Chief Symbols in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’ ”  American Literature 38 (1966): 323-36.  This article outlines Hawthorne’s use of flower imagery in a few other works including “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” The Marble Faun and The House of the Seven Gables.  Kloeckner believes that Hawthorne uses flower imagery to show the development of affection (324).  He goes on to indicate that flowers symbolize love as well.  Perhaps the most interesting strain in Kloeckner’s thought is that of the connection between flowers and what he calls an “Edenic quality of true love” (325).  This idea may not hold to be true in The Blithedale Romance.

Lefcowitz, Allan and Barbara.  “Some Rents in the Veil: New Light on Priscilla and Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance.”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21.3 (1966): 263-75.  The Lefcowitz’s begin by identifying Zenobia and Priscilla’s particular symbols as the flower and the purse, respectively.  They then focus on the character of Priscilla in order to show that “Priscilla’s ambiguity is not so much an effect as a cause: that is, the novel’s suggestion of a pernicious moral climate develops from Hawthorne’s ambivalent conceptualization of Priscilla’s ontological status as the personification of an unalloyed spiritual good” (265)  “From this point of view, it is the exploitative and spiritually bankrupt nature of the moral environment that renders Priscilla inadequate and corruptible, not any a priori hesitancy or ambivalence about her intrinsic plausibility” (265).  Hence, the authors of the article hold that given a different scenario, Priscilla may not be seen as inadequate.  The question of Priscilla’s background is considered, and the symbol of the purse is pondered.  In addition, the Lefcowitz’s compare Zenobia and Priscilla’s flowers. 

Lentz, Vern B. and Allen Stein.  “The Black Flower of Necessity: Structure in The Blithedale Romance.”  Essays in Literature 3 (1976): 86-96.  Lentz breaks The Blithedale Romance down into five sections, each with its own crisis that must be resolved.  Throughout this article, he shows how Miles Coverdale bounces from crisis to crisis as narrator and participant only to withdraw from each crisis instead of proactively confronting it.  The “black flower” mentioned in the title comes from The Scarlet Letter, and it indicates a need or a void that must be confronted.  In this case, it is Coverdale who must be doing the confronting.

Lewis, Jone J.  "Transcendentalist Women Part 1."  About: Women’s History.  2001.  About.  17 Dec. 2001 <http://womenshistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa031599.htm>.  This site contains some pertinent Historical information on Margaret Fuller.

Long, Robert E.  The Great Succession: Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne.  Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1979.  This book looks at the Boston of James and Hawthorne by considering works from each author.  In particular, Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance is compared to James’ The Bostonians.  This work is useful in that, by contrasting James’ works with Hawthorne’s, it encourages readers to wonder why social relationships of Hawthorne’s characters are so ambivalent.  Since James claimed that, in his The Bostonians, he had provided that which The Blithedale Romance lacked, we are left to wonder why Hawthorne’s characters are so indecisive.

McCall, Dan.  Citizens of Somewhere Else: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James.  Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999.  The chapter on The Blithedale Romance gives good insight into the ideas and arguments exchanged between Emerson and Hawthorne.  In it, McCall also spends some time discussing the connection between Zenobia and Margaret Fuller.  He notes that James considered Zenobia Hawthorne’s finest attempt at a full person in a character.  The rest of the chapter is dedicated to an examination of some of James’ work.

Miller, John N.  “Eros and Ideology: At the Heart of Hawthorne’s Blithedale.”  Nineteenth-Century Literature 55.1 (2000): 1-21.  Miller holds that heart is at the center of the conflict of The Blithedale Romance.  Throughout his article, Miller looks at love by means of both eros, or sexuality, and sympathy.  He pairs the confusion of female eros against a tendency toward sympathy and, hence, true love.  “In the grip of eros, however, human characters become emotionally ambivalent, unstable, unpredictable, and—in their unfaithful yearning for union with the Other—incomplete” (15).  It is almost as if Miller sees the whole of The Blithedale Romance as a series of confusions that constantly prevent or distract characters from expressing their actual love for each other.

Rosa, Alfred.  Salem, Transcendentalism, and Hawthorne.  London: Associated UP, 1980.  This book was written in order to look at the influence of Transcendentalism in Salem, Massachusetts.  It starts out with a view of Salem in 1830, discusses Transcendentalisms impact on Salem, examines the public reaction, and, finally, focuses on the effect Transcendentalism had on Hawthorne.  Rosa discusses “The Custom House” as well as The Blithedale Romance.  There is significant reference to Brook Farm.

Schriber, Mary S.  “Justice to Zenobia.”  The New England Quarterly.  55.1 (1982): 61-78.  Schriber’s article begins with this statement on Zenobia: “Zenobia, of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, is either a disappointing heroine in a radically flawed work or one of the most misunderstood characters in nineteenth-century American Literature” (61).  She does her best to question the death of Zenobia and argues that many critics have too readily been accepting of Miles Coverdale’s account of the alleged suicide.  The first pages of the article are dedicated to an explanation of Coverdale’s character.  After showing some evidence of narrator’s lack of reliability, Schriber goes on to describe Zenobia as a character who is more reliable and more in-control of her emotions and responses:  “She can be either angry or playful, depending upon an intelligent assessment of the situation, on subjects she takes seriously.  She reacts angrily to Coverdale’s condescending smile at her mention of ‘women’s wider liberty,’ for example, but when the subject of women’s work comes up, she piles up infinitives that signal a whimsical approach to the issue” (68).  She later suggests that, if Zenobia does commit suicide, that perhaps it is because of her loss of hope for “the improvement of women’s lot” (76).  She believes that, since Zenobia had such control over her reactions toward men that her death may have been prompted by what can be considered feminist reasons (77).  This author does not believe that Zenobia’s character could have changed so fundamentally so quickly as to cause her to commit suicide over her own failed love affair.

Smith, Judy R.  “The Blithedale Romance: Hawthorne’s Ballad of the Pallid Posy and the Hothouse Gem.”  Hawthorne’s Women and Weeds: What Really Happens in the Garden: 105-38.  Diss. Indiana U, 1979.  DAI 40 (1980): 4045A-46A.  Within this chapter of her dissertation, Smith wonders at the development of flower symbols in The Blithedale Romance.  She notices the cycle that can be seen through what she calls a “vegetable rubric” (108).  Smith claims that Zenobia’s symbol, the flower, should be some indication to the reader that hers is a life of impermanence.  Just as a flower blooms to eventually die, Zenobia is to going to die.  Smith states it thus: “In constructing such a flower symbol for Zenobia, there is the suggestion that the passionate, mythic vitality of such a woman is fated to die—to be transformed into an artificial gem—because such an exotic species cannot exist in a climate unfavorable to it.  Coverdale fosters that climate by constructing Zenobia’s personality from glimpses of her outward appearance” (110).  She also focuses on Coverdale’s interpretation of Zenobia as opposed to her true self.  It seems that, for Smith, Coverdale is a character who found himself enraptured with Zenobia, yet, as soon as he realized it, he stopped himself and felt threatened by his near loss of that control.  Smith also spends a significant amount of time explaining the character of Priscilla.  She notes that while Priscilla also has a connection with flowers, they are never the same that are equated with Zenobia (119-120).  The notion of the weeds becomes the tainting of Priscilla’s delicate flowers. 

---.  Introduction.  Judy R. Smith vii-xii.  This introduction to Smith’s dissertation serves to outline Hawthorne’s general use of flower symbolism in his fictions.  She speaks of images of “innocent posies,” “destructive weeds,” “fair maidens,” and “dark women” being treated in various different ways in order to communicate something about human relationships.(viii).  At the end of her introduction, she comes to this conclusion: “…we can choose one of three reasons—besides Hawthorne’s use of a major nineteenth-century literary convention—why Hawthorne created his dark women: because he used them as a conscious element in his purely didactic purposes; because they are an uncontrollable extension of his unresolved psychological ambivalence; or because they are the result of cultural limitations” (xi).  The author asserts, though, that there is no one true answer as to why Hawthorne creates his dark women and connects them with healthy flowers in full bloom. 

Wallace, James D.  “Hawthorne and the Scribbling Women Reconsidered.”  American Literature 62.2 (1990), 201-22.  Wallace begins this article by considering why, if Hawthorne referred to women writers as “scribbling women,” he included women writers when he was making a recommendation to an Englishman who was a friend of his publisher William D. Ticknor.  His article shows “that the rhetoric of Hawthorne’s comments on women writers is the rhetoric of his own self-critiques, that the indecorous exposures of the personal, the familial, and the bodily that he condemned them were preoccupations of his own art, and that the women writer came to represent for him the bodily and mutable, the mortal that he sought to purge from and to embrace in his own work” (203).  Wallace mentions several instances from within Hawthorne’s writings and letters where it may become evident that the reason he criticized women writers so harshly is that he saw too much of what dissatisfied him about his own work (208).