WE KNOW ABOUT "dystopian" novels, of course, but Hawthorne's may be the earliest example of an adjacent phenomenon, the "anti-utopian" novel, in which some bold and idealistic experiment in reforming human society comes a cropper due to all-too-human venality, pettiness, and short-sightedness. The inspiration for the novel lay in Hawthorne's time at Brook Farm, an 1840s experiment in communal living partly inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier (there were quite a few comparable experiments at the time). He ended up not much caring for it.
The novel is funny, in a satirical and somewhat ungenerous way, and has some brilliant writing. The most memorable character is Zenobia, who may be one of the first fictional depictions of an American feminist, apparently based in large part on Margaret Fuller. There's a tablespoon of spite in the portrait, I'd say, but she jumps off the page. She's certainly more interesting than Miles Coverdale, the Hawthorne-like narrator.
Literary works puncturing the balloon of human presumption have a long history. We could go back to Candide or Gulliver's Travels, not to mention Hamlet, the theology of John Calvin and the Book of Ecclesiastes. But circumstances change after the French Revolution, say, and the idea takes hold that humans can re-design their communities to make them more rational. Hawthorne's novel must be one of the earlier takedowns of that kind of overconfidence.
Modern inheritors--perhaps T. C. Boyle and Michel Houellebecq? And most campus novels, come to think of it, since they tend to contrast higher education's noble mission and its often shabby shortcomings. And definitely most writing program novels--Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, Lucy Ives's Loudermilk, Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans...all descendants of The Blithedale Romance.
No comments:
Post a Comment