10 - Sympathy and reform in The Blithedale Romance

Summary

For a participant in a reform association that aspires to regenerate society, Miles Coverdale, the first-person narrator of Hawthorne's third novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852), spends very little time actually doing the work of social reform. Instead, he seems content simply to look at people, imagine their private circumstances, and fantasize about their sexual proclivities and histories. Does this mean that the narrator of Hawthorne's novel of social reform is merely a voyeur whose only true commitment is to the pleasures of his private imagination? In a key moment about two-thirds into the novel, Coverdale offers his own reflections on his moral imagination just after dreaming that Hollingsworth and Zenobia are kissing over his bed while Priscilla shrinks away, and just before he peers through the boarding-house window where he discovers Zenobia, Priscilla, and Westervelt together for some mysterious purpose. Initially he judges his imagination in negative terms, proclaiming, “That cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people’s passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart.” But then he rejects that negative assessment, declaring that his voyeuristic tendencies have everything to do with what he regards as the excess of his sympathetic imagination: “But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is cold or warm. It now impresses me, that, if I erred at all, in regard to Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much sympathy, rather than too little” (iii: 154). Sympathy is the key word here.