Among the themes and motifs present in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, among the more resonant include the theme of manipulation and the resultant disillusionment that characters face. Coverdale’s observation that “human character was but soft wax in his hands” concisely indicates the sort of person that Hollingsworth is; Hollingsworth, has a tremendous skill and places a great deal of value on manipulating people to suit his own desires (Hawthorne 198).
On another level, there may be no truly likeable character in this work, which compounds the disillusionment embedded within the story. Even Coverdale, with his invasive voyeuristic tendencies, is a bizarre and problematic character, and since Hawthorne places him in the position of narrator, this defaults the reader into siding with Coverdale. Viewing the plot from a hiding place in the brush, or on several instances, through the windows into houses or hotel rooms, placed me as a reader in an uncomfortable position, even forcing me to become disillusioned with the notion, conditioned and reinforced in so many novels of the time period, that the narrator can be trustworthy. The work feels as though Coverdale produces the discomforting camera angles from which this drama unfolds, while Hollingsworth’s manipulative qualities cast him as the director of the entire thing.
Futhermore, Coverdale disillusions the reader with his closing confession of enduring love for Priscilla, which is at odds with the fact that we as readers have already observed his perverse shallowness. For the time that was becoming acquainted with Zenobia, she attempted to engage him in a discussion of his poetry, while Coverdale instead spent much of that occasion fantasizing about her and, in the voyeuristic manner that characterizes him, he instead focuses on “one glimpse of a white shoulder (15). This demonstrates that all of these characters have their own agendas, and it is little wonder that the characters’ half-hearted attempts at achieving a utopia fail; a perfect society cannot exist if people subscribe to it with their own interests and agendas at heart.
-Lukas Johnson 9/1/11
