The Blithedale Romance Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance is an extremely enigmatic text. Due to its highly complicated and confusing plot, as well as its somewhat unreliable narrative, it is difficult--and some theorists would say impossible--to...

Hawthorne’s science fiction short stories, such as ‘The Birthmark’ and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ are set in the seventeenth century. His novels, however, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, are set in the nineteenth century,...

Nathaniel Hawthorne is notorious for portraying characters whose past largely affects who they are and how they act in the future, and The Blithedale Romance is no exception. The interesting thing about The Blithedale Romance is that much of the...

Throughout history and literature, utopias usually materialize as attempts to fashion a more perfect society, typically catalyzed by a disagreeable quality of the current civilization. Having an understanding of the purpose for the creation of...

Benjamin Scott Grossberg, in “Coverdale’s Queer Utopia,” responds to what he posits as “attempts to contain [Miles] Coverdale’s erotic desire,” attempts that consequently “lead to strange contortions of the text” (24). Other critics, according to...

Both Pierre and The Blithedale Romance are structured around what Lucy would have called, if Hawthorne had written her, exhibiting secrets. Since he didn’t, she prefers the slightly less libidinally charged “disclose,” but this moment of...