ABSTRACT
The Blithedale Romance is a novel about revolution, and has an intense negative vision, perhaps not as massive as Cooper's or as 'thunderous' as Melville's, but delicate, frequently comic, and also 'tragical'-as Henry James noted in his Hawthorne, it is both 'tragical' and 'the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest' of Hawthorne's fictions. The marked freedom of expression of The Blithedale Romance can be connected with the use of Miles Coverdale as the narrator. It is not only that he is a poet and a wit and that Hawthorne inhabits the past brilliantly, but that he approaches that perfect point of view which Henry James came to see as the best mediation of fictional events. However, there is a verbal irony in the connection of 'solid' with 'philanthropy' which hints at the contradiction in Hollingsworth's character and the contradictory enterprises of the 'aesthetic laborers'. Blithedale Romance is full of such ironies masquerading as innocent phraseology.
