A Study Of The Suburban-Pastoral Ideal In The Blithedale Romance

The Blithedale Romance revolves round a group of reformers who escape from the city and try to establish a utopian farm in the suburbs of Boston.The imagined establishment of the farm,Blithedale.emanating from Brook Farm which Hawthorne participates in personally,located between the city and the country,implies the author's concern with the antebellum American mentality preoccupied with the suburban-pastoral ideal.With due attention to the historical and social background of antebellum New England,this thesis analyzes how the Blithedale farm is presented as a middle landscape in the novel.Along the line of inquiry,it deals with Hawthorne's use of romance as a genre,illustrating how Hawthorne combines the realistic depiction of the city with the romantic imagination of the idyllic pastoral life in the ideal.It points out that the continual allusion to the theatre,the ineradicable class consciousness and gender division of labor evidenced in the experiment implies the ideal cannot be achieved.The argument of this thesis is that the suburban-pastoral ideal represented as a social utopia is essentially an illusion,which intimates Hawthorne's skeptical attitude toward the reform craze in antebellum America.The thesis is divided into three chapters.The first chapter explicates the representation of three types of landscape in the novel:the city,the forest,and the Blithedale farm.Particularly,Blithedale is exempt from the urban artificiality and the uncertainties of the woods,and simultaneously possesses physical comfort and natural scenery.It is the representation of the suburban-pastoral ideal.The second chapter studies how Hawthorne uses the romance to represent city and nature in the Blithedale farm.In this chapter,the melodramatic mode,strategy of neutral territory,and Gothic features will be analyzed in detail.The third chapter explores the falure of the social reform and the reason of it.Allusions to the theatre reveal the illusory essence of the reform.Class stratification and gender division of labor that is typical of the city can still be found in the farm.The fact that the reformers never abandon the preconceived notions of the city is the main reason of the failure of the experiment.