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Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance".(19th-century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne)(Critical Essay)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20010322
Author:ULLEN, MAGNUS

Ever since the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, readers have been prone to look on the novel as a roman clef of some sort or other. Despite the author's protestations in the preface that the characters "are entirely fictitious" (2), critics have, over the years, speculated about possible real-life models for the characters. Most famously, Zenobia has been taken to be a thinly veiled portrayal of Margaret Fuller.' As to the book's narrator, Miles Coverdale, most critics agree that he is primarily modeled on Hawthorne himself: The many correspondences ...

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