Zenobia: In Memorium

Upon my completion of the novel "The Blithedale Romance" I began to debate whether I hated or respected Nathaniel Hawthorne for the direction he took this novel. It would seem that this novel, along with "Transcendental Wild Oats" are both meant to deconstruct the fantastical ideas behind transcendentalism, however unlike Alcott's approach this book quickly departed from the transcendental theory and turned into something of a soap opera with characters which met at Blithedale. While not an entirely non-compelling story, it redirected the moral of the story. Where Alcott's Brook Farm failed because a few good people had bad or misguided ideas, it seemed Hawthorne's Blithedale failed because, though there were good ideas within they were simply implemented by bad people (or perhaps weak people). Blithedale was a functioning community, the writers acclimated to the work and learned their lessons about a hard days work, and gained new introspection when they returned to their normal world, the only downfall of Blithedale was that one of their members was sort of a tool and decided to buy the place and re purpose it. It left me only with a foggy idea on Hawthorne's views toward transcendentalism and the validity of this line of thought.

On the other hand, what I do respect about this book is that it investigates human nature on a new level. This book was rich in symbolism, a feature which helped me to continue thinking about events as they occurred in the book, culminating to an end which drew many of the metaphors into a very nice well thought out conclusion, such as the story of the veiled lady and Zenobia's mythos.

Hawthorne is good at making sure his characters don't seem too perfect, or a picture perfect story specimen, however I think where he takes great efforts to make real characters he almost makes some of them too despicable hits an extreme on the other end of the spectrum. This particularly occurred in the stories of Coverdale as well as Zenobia. Zenobia was shown not to be as strong in her resolve toward her ideals, and this was an intriguing direction, but her immediate betrayal of ideal she had supposedly wrote and defended in great detail (and at the hands of what may be called a misogynist no less) was almost too ridiculous to believe. Coverdale was taken to an extreme as well, and while in the beginning I was anxious to see his romanticized thoughts come crashing down under the weight of reality, Coverdale was still babbling on about Zenobia's fine beauty in the context of her being dredged out of a river with a hook through her chest. Even more than that I was prepared to walk away from the book not hating Coverdale until I read his final confession, which just seemed like it had been tossed into the book for a couple "oohs" and "aaaahs." It was all fairly comedic by the end to witness. Hollingsworth and Priscilla's characters, however were executed in a way that was well balanced in my opinion, with the right amount of good intent and deception. I honestly enjoyed Hawthorne's scrutiny toward the intentions of overly charitable people and found myself agreeing on several points.

In conclusion, this book had some very intriguing points to make, but I feel like it got lost in itself and strayed from really speaking about transcendentalist though. While there was some juicy thinking material in there I found myself sitting back and cringing at the characters exaggerated soap opera-esque actions far too often.

~Bonzer