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Hawthorne and Bellamy: Two Views on Man and Society
| Article
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18701 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
5,858 Words |
| Author
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Milton Birnbaum
Milton Birnbaum is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and
professor of English at American International College in
Springfield, Massachusetts. |
The year 1952 marked the centenary of the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. While it is true that by then Hawthorne was no longer "the obscurest man of letters in America" (as he referred to himself in the 1837 preface to his Twice-Told Tales), there was relatively little public or even academic recognition of either Hawthorne or his utopian novel.
By contrast, 1988, the centennial of the publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, saw a Bellamy boom: there was a proliferation of lectures, conferences, meetings, and projected articles and books on both the author and his most famous book. Not only were college and university conferences scheduled in his native state of Massachusetts, but the Mid-America American Studies Association held a three-day conference at the University of Missouri with the awesome theme of "Looking Backward: Class, Gender, Technology, and the Making of Modern Culture," and the 1988 edition of Books in Print listed six different paperback editions of Bellamy's novel. While the Bellamy bandwagon rolled on, Hawthorne remained, if not hidden, at least "obscure." Although this year marks the sesquicentennial of the utopian experiment at the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and although 1992 will be the 140th anniversary of the first publication of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, it is doubtful whether there will be the kind of public and academic interest in either the Brook Farm experiment or in Hawthorne's novel that greeted Bellamy and his novel in 1988.
The comparative popularity of both is interesting but not important; what is important is to analyze what each tells us about man and society because their opposing views are still being debated today. Hawthorne's dark vision of man and human attempts to reform society needs to be lightened by Bellamy's buoyant belief that society is on the path to utopia. Bellamy's euphoric vision of the future has to be balanced by Hawthorne's more profound belief that in order to change society, man must reform himself. Each author provides a corrective lens for the other's excesses.
The Blithedale Romance
In his preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne states that
his present concern with the Social Community [the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education at West Roxbury, Massachusetts] is merely to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where
...
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