The Sameness of Difference: 'Pierre' and 'The Blithedale Romance Anonymous College

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 comparative chastity is by no means representative. The purpose of Lucy’s words here is to provide a definition, specifically a definition of love. The centrality of this concept to The Blithedale Romance is obvious—though where, exactly, this center is to be placed is an ongoing question in and about the text—yet it’s treatment is slightly more ambiguous in Pierre. But to the extent that there is an “errand” (either received or produced) to be found in either text, that errand is common to both texts, and it is structured by its relation to the discourse surrounding love and sexual difference. The spectral, utopian vision of the “millennium” in each takes on the form of a consummation that is explicitly sexual, an emergence into maturity that marks a new relation to the knowledge inscribed in the body of a woman. When the present-absence of this knowledge emerges, it precipitates a symbolic rupture, a rupture in the order of the symbolic, the repair of which is the (failed) task of both...