The Blithedale Romance: Hawthorne is Coverdale

Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Blithedale Romance”, is the first person narration of a man set upon joining a world that has no need of him by imposing an absolute order upon his reality. Based on his own experiences at the utopian Brook Farm during the 1840s, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Blithedale Romance” in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of much of the Transcendentalist’s beliefs. Miles Coverdale will often exaggerate about the negative qualities that he sees in people that live with him. In fact, he seems to have an aptness for picking out those qualities and constantly dwelling on them. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Miles Coverdale as a disguise to show his own dissatisfaction with the negativity of the people who lived at Brook Farm. Many critics, among others, believe that the fictional Coverdale is really a representation of Hawthorne himself. Coverdale’s weaknesses are how Hawthorne saw his own weaknesses. One of those primary weaknesses must surely be that he exaggerated both good and bad at Blithedale, and had a negative opinion of the experiment from the beginning. Nathaniel Hawthorne seems to be making fun of himself by making Miles Coverdale an equivocating poet who really has little interest in anything and survives primarily all by himself.