376
PARTISAN REVIEW
driven home. This divided intention cannot but impair the dra–
matic structures of
The Blithedale Romance
and
The Marble Faun,
and these two narratives are in fact much inferior to
The Scarlet
Letter.
But the
Romcmce,
with its marvelous sense of place and
weather and with its contrasted tableaux of town and country, has
a unique appeal of its own. Both James and Lawrence have testi–
fied to its l,lttraction. The former speaks of it as "leaving in the
memory an impression analogous to that of an April day-an
alternation of brightness and shadow, of broken sun-patches and
sprinkling clouds." James also thought that in Zenobia Hawthorne
made his nearest approach to the complete creation of a character.
But this vivid brunette is treated with much less sympathy than
Hester-and perhaps the reason is that since she exerts greater
sexual power she must needs be subjected to firmer measures of
control. At any rate, his attitude to her is markedly more subjec–
tive, and this note of subjectivity is one of the charms of the
Romance,
the unfailing charm of the confessional tone and of the
personal modulation. The story is told through a narrator by the
name of Miles Coverdale, a minor Boston poet in whom one easily
discerns many features of the author.
No sooner does Coverdale come upon Zenobia in Blithedale–
a Utopian colony inhabited by a "little army of saints and mar–
tyrs"-than her beauty moves him to rhapsodic appreciation; he
is in a fever of susceptibility, and the very next day a fit of sickness
lays him low. His illness and exhaustion render him
~ven
more
sensitive-morbidly so-to what he calls "Zenobia's sphere."
(What a master stroke, this episode of Coverdale's illness, with its
suggestions of a rite of passage from one mode of life to another!)
Obviously infatuated with her, he is not the man to submit to such
a feeling. By what is plainly a psychological detour-analysts
would see in it an example of protective displacement-he per–
suades himself that his real attachment is to Zenobia's half-sister,
the mediumistic, shadowy snow-maiden who is the Prissy of the
tale. This convenient self-deception permits him to covet Zenobia
and to pry into her affairs without in any way committing himself
to her-for how could he, a paleface poet with overcharged
scruples, make up to a woman who is "passionate, luxurious, lack-·
ing simplicity, not deeply refined, incapable of pure and perfect
