The narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Miles Coverdale (and Hawthorne himself as his preface shows), inhabits the space between the internal world of the writer and the external world of his society. The curious synthesis of author and narrator established in the preface makes for a unique novel in which Coverdale stands for much more than a minor poet.
This novel seems to represent Hawthorne’s attempt to reconcile the opposing spheres of the ideological and the material through writing and Transcendentalism. As one of the foremost early American writers, this reconciliation is part of Hawthorne’s ongoing quest to formulate an American literary identity. As such, Coverdale represents the concerns of both Hawthorne and an entire nation.
Through his treatment of Brook Farm (the transcendentalist community that inspired the novel’s Blithedale commune) in the preface, Hawthorne introduces the unusual form that his novel will take by stressing that “his present concern with the socialist community is merely to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives” (ix). This is clearly a problematic desire since he can neither fully erect such a separate space nor control the interpretation of his readers. Therefore, from its first pages, The Blithedale Romance foregrounds its interest in liminal space.
Hawthorne’s preface highlights the novel’s interest in the divide between coexisting realities. He draws the reader’s attention to the tension between the real events and people that inspired the novel and how he has written them. His preface establishes that he as the author of the novel, and by extension its narrator, will assume the in-between space in which his memory of Brook Farm dwells.
Hawthorne describes this space as “essentially a daydream, and yet a fact—and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality” (x). Here, Hawthorne sets up a divide that he continues in his character, Coverdale, who inhabits the space between contrasting states: daydream and fact, reality and fiction, waking and dreaming, internal human life and external human society, and the material and the spiritual.
It is also noteworthy that Hawthorne refers to himself as “he” in his preface. Hawthorne thereby alerts the reader that it is not merely Coverdale who inhabits the space between divided realities, but Hawthorne himself. Moreover, the fact that he doesn’t use “I,” but rather refers to himself as “the author,” merges himself––Hawthorne the writer, of the preface and novel––with Coverdale, the writer character and thinly veiled vessel of Hawthorne’s confusion about his world.
The apparent schism in Hawthorne’s writing appears to be connected to his struggle for an American identity and literature. The challenge that the American is faced with is how to unite identity with topography. That is, how to merge the geographical space of America with the conceptual space of what it means to be an American. Not surprisingly, the responsibility for this difficult union often falls on the writer.