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영어

This essay aims to explore Nathaniel Hawthorne’s political attitude toward slavery suggested in The Blithedale Romance (1852), as a way of reexamining and questionizing Jean Fagan Yellin’s claim that Hawthorne fails to show slavery issue in his romances. The Blithedale Romance was published amidst the period of the heated debate over the issue of slavery all over the United States. To elucidate Hawthorne’s conservative politics on the slavery, first, this essay focuses not only on the veil imagery in the frame story (story within a story) of a Veiled Lady, but also on the bond-slave motif reiterated throughout the text in the mutually asymmetrical master/slave relationships among main characters such as Prischilla, Zenobia, Hollingsworth, Westervelt, and the narrator Coverdale. Second, this essay examines the author’s conservative attitudes toward his contemporary progressive reformists, considering the author’s own experiences and observations in 1841 at the experimental utopian community, Brook Farm, as a crucial basis of creating The Blithedale Romance, and his presidential campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, Life of Franklin Pierce (1852). Lastly, this essay investigates the author’s psychological fear of violence which, from Hawthorne’s perspective, seemed to occur among some renowned radical activists’ antislavery movements in antebellum America. To explore Hawthorne’s fear of violence, this essay focuses on the philanthropist Hollingsworth’s commitment of violence to Zenobia’s heart and her dead body in a psychological and physical manner, respectively. This study would help us understand that Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance is a political romance insinuating his skeptical conservatism in abrogating slavery system, the peculiar institution of the United States.