Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Blithedale Romance (Everyman Paperback Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne ISBN: 0-460-87403-9 Publisher: Tuttle Publishing Pub. Date: 01 September, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: magic realism
Comment: Hawthorne was able to work within a strict set of boundaries to create something of a social call to arms and equally,a strange, unwordly tale. The scenes in the forest are a clear antecedent to those writers in the 20th century working the magic realism vein. Above and beyond all of this though is the magnificent use of language to create atmosphere and brilliantly delineated characters. It's a gorgeous book ; the effect as rich as a Gauguin painting.
Rating: 4
Summary: Surprising
Comment: It's been over seven months since I read the BLithedale roamnce, and I find myself still turning it over in my head. Hawthorne has received alot of bad treatment by feminists groups...but in many ways, I think this book is rather feminine in perspective. Skip the big Hawthorne novels and concentrate on his later, better, less well-known works. They're magic.
Rating: 2
Summary: " Utopia Folded Its Tent In 1847 "
Comment: Nathaniel Hawthorne's third major novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852), is a faster moving and more colorful novel than his second, 1851's bloodless The House Of The Seven Gables, but, sadly, that it the best that can be said for it. Like a vaguely - conceived puzzle with several essential pieces missing, the book ambles uncertainly along, thematically a little bit about everything but finally about nothing in particular. As with all Hawthorne's novels and many of his shorter works, there is a barely a paragraph or chapter that is not triply overwritten, and obfuscation, rather than clarity, is the order of the day throughout. Depth of any kind is not one of the novel's strengths, and stilted language ("Lip of man will never touch my hand again") abounds. Hawthorne's cast - introverted, voyeuristic narrator Miles Coverdale, apparent utopist visionary Hollingsworth, wealthy feminist crusader Zenobia, and guileless ingenue Priscilla - are more like glittering but partially - carved mannequins than substantial characters capable of sustaining a novel.
The Blithedale Romance has historically been promoted as a novel about an experimental socialist utopia, but as Brenda Wineapple outlined in the excellent Hawthorne: A Life (2003), Hawthorne himself was unsure of what the genuine focus of the book was. Earlier titles considered were "Hollingsworth," "Hollingsworth: A Romance," "Miles Coverdale's Three Friends," "Zenobia," and simply "Priscilla." For lack of anything better, "The Blithedale Romance" was chosen; upon publication, the novel was praised by Washington Irving and Herman Melville, but panned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thought it "unworthy of Hawthorne's talent." Reviews were generally negative, and James T. Fields, Hawthorne's publisher, said, "let us hope there will be no more Blithedales."
A socialist experiment in creating a utopia - Blithedale - does figure in the background, and acts as the novel's primary setting, but, except for some very occasional blather, the complex concerns of bringing a functional, working utopia into existence are entirely ignored and have nothing to do with the real impetus of the novel.
For most of the book, only the primary characters seem to be claustrophobically present at Blithedale. Caught up in an incestuous tangle, the four are enclosed and cut off from the rest of humanity by the potentially shattering world of nature that lies inherent in the farm itself. Nothing emphasizes this more than the existence of Coverdale's own hidden tree-top bower and surrogate womb, where he finds escape and solace from the explosive emotional realities bubbling under the brittle social surface; a late pagan masquerade, straight out of 'The May - Pole Of Merry Mount' solidifies Blithedale as a liminal space where anything might happen, including free love in all its hetero-, homo-, and bisexual aspects. But caught up instead in a sudsy melodrama of vaunted idealism, unconscious egotism, shrewdly - enacted treachery, and unrequited love, the characters shuffle through a hazy, uneven plot that is little more than an undisguised 19th century soap opera.
The Blithedale Romance is also a shaky indictment of Protestant hypocrisy, as its characters are uncomfortably snared between dueling impulses of wishful altruism and a wolfish desire for the absolute triumph of individual will. As presented, the noble society of man is a fragile sham, a frail plywood structure eternally dissolving at the edges, visibly or otherwise.
Neurotic temptress Zenobia (a character primarily based on Hawthorne's friend Margaret Fuller) is the only partially successful character, though her ridiculous, syrupy, and embarrassingly off - center platitudes about struggling womanhood ("in the battlefield of life, the downright stroke, that would fall only on a man's steel head - piece, is sure to light on a woman's heart, over which she wears no breastplate...," "I am a woman - with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had, weak, vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex; for our virtues, when we have any, are merely impulsive and intuitive,) passionate, too...") virtually guarantee her absurdist martyrdom on a wayward altar of feminist suffering.
As the story draws to a conclusion, a series of extraordinary and crudely executed coincidences attempt, and fail, to tie the torpid plot into a neat bundle. Hawthorne finally allows semi - warrior, quasi - vampire, and arch hypocrite Zenobia to go the way of masochistic Ophelia, gurgling brook, brisk current, emerald moss, reeds, rushes, and all. Far from shedding light on the inferior status of women in American society in the 1850s, Hawthorne presents the subject like a mocking and garish caricature.
Since Hawthorne wanly satirizes everything and everyone, including his narrator, himself (as the author of the book, who is not to be confused with the narrator), and his style, and as his attempts at satire and irony are uniformly without edge, the book sinks, as Ophelia did, like a stone.
 |
Title: The House of the Seven Gables (Bantam Classic) by Nathaniel Hawthorne ISBN: 0553212702 Publisher: Bantam Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1987 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
 |
Title: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Penguin Classics) by Herman Melville, John Bryant ISBN: 0140434887 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
 |
Title: Selected Tales and Sketches (Penguin Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio ISBN: 014039057X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1987 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
 |
Title: The Marble Faun (Penguin Classics) by Nathaniel Hawthorne ISBN: 0140390774 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
 |
Title: The American by Henry James, Leon Edel ISBN: 0451525175 Publisher: Signet Classics Pub. Date: 01 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
