Book Review: The Blithedale Romance

[osprey_archer]

I finished Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, which disappointed me twice, although the first time was not its fault. I decided to read the book because histories of the utopian experiment at Brook Farm always mention it, and I was therefore hoping for lots of thinly veiled memoir about life at Brook Farm, but that’s not what the book is

Comments

[asakiyume]

Hollingsworth and Chillingsworth? Hawthorne, you need to get a different name generator. This one turns them out too similar.

[osprey_archer]

Now I'm wondering if there's some underlying commonality between the characters that explains the similarity between the name. Chillingsworth was the cuckolded husband in The Scarlet Letter, right? It's been a loooong time since I read it, but I remember that he struck me as being pretty much a straight up bad dude, unlike Hollingsworth who is a man of many virtues and moral strength which is tragically corrupted by his monomaniacal devotion to his ideal.

[asakiyume]

Yep, Chillingsworth was the cuckolded husband. And I think the monomaniacal devotion to something may be the thing that links them. Chillingworth was set on destroying Dimmesdale (the lover) through gradually uncovering his guilt. I guess he didn't see it so much as vengeance but as pursuing what was bad and wrong, which, oh, by the way, was also the bad and wrong that HURT ME AND STOLE MY WIFE'S HEART (even though I was old and cold and probably couldn't have held onto it anyway).

[osprey_archer]

That's why they both have that ironic "worth" in their names. They're both devoted to something theoretically worthy - Hollingsworth to his philanthropical project, Chillingsworth to truth and justice (at least in his own mind), but in the end it makes them both monstrous.