SOURCE: “Substance and Reality in Hawthorne's Meta-Utopia,” in Utopian Studies, Vol. 1, 1987, pp. 173-87.

In the following essay, Jacobs investigates the utopian elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.

“Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning—or, at least, thought I had.”

Hawthorne to Fields, 1854

The unusual mix of autobiographical/historical subject matter and allegorical method in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance has led readers down a number of critical paths which seem insufficient, even in the views of critics themselves, to account for both matter and method in the book. The earliest readers, taking for granted that Brook Farm was the real subject of the work, approached it as a roman a clef, eagerly seeking portraits of Fuller, Channing, and Alcott¹ or an analysis of why...