I recently discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance through Christopher Scalia‘s The Good Books, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The story of a failed utopian community feels eerily relevant as we watch various idealistic movements rise and fall around us today.
Fighting Through the Victorian Prose
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Hawthorne’s writing style is a challenge for modern readers. Those endless, flowery paragraphs can feel like swimming through molasses. As an author, I have learned to fight against the instincts to write these long paragraphs because if you do, no one will read your work! My friend Elena, an experienced high school English literature teacher, jokes that “this is what you get when authors were paid by the word!” But stick with it—Hawthorne’s insights into human nature are worth the effort.
The Setup: Young Idealists Meet Reality
The plot centers on a group of privileged young people who decide to abandon their comfortable lives for “authentic” communal living on Blithedale Farm. They want to work the soil, live simply, and create something pure and meaningful. Sound familiar?
The narrator (essentially Hawthorne himself) becomes fascinated by Zenobia, the wealthy, charismatic woman who serves as the community’s unofficial queen. But it’s Hollingsworth who steals the show—a serious, middle-aged man obsessed with reforming criminals, which the book calls “philanthropy” (though not quite in our modern sense).
Early on, the narrator observes something almost sacred about Hollingsworth:
“It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits (except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine interview from which he passes into his daily life.”
There’s reverence here, but Hawthorne hints at “great errors” to come.
The Philosophy Behind the Failure
Hawthorne weaves in criticism of Fourierism—the utopian philosophy of Charles Fourier (the French philosopher, not the mathematician). Fourier inspired numerous intentional communities with his radical ideas about bringing order to human chaos. Many of his once-controversial concepts eventually became mainstream.
But Hollingsworth sees something sinister in Fourier’s approach:
“He has committed the unpardonable sin; for what more monstrous iniquity could the Devil himself contrive than to choose the selfish principle,—the principle of all human wrong, the very blackness of man’s heart, the portion of ourselves which we shudder at, and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate,—to choose it as the master workman of his system?”
Here’s the book’s central tension: Hollingsworth condemns Fourier for building a system on selfish motives, yet the reader must ask whether Hollingsworth himself is guilty of the same sin in his obsessive, uncompromising pursuit of criminal reform.
When Idealism Turns Destructive
As the story unfolds, the narrator discovers the true scope of Hollingsworth’s plans for the farm—and they’re not pretty. In a confrontation that feels like watching a friendship die, the narrator refuses to support the scheme:
“Your fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine that any such realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be brought to pass?”
The Inevitable End
The Blithedale residents, for all their high-minded talk, prove to be exactly what you’d expect: privileged young people playing at hardship, like “college students with large trust funds.” Their activities are charming but unproductive, and the community drifts toward its inevitable conclusion—a funeral.
Even in death, the “colonists” of Blithedale abandon their grand ideas about creating new rituals and “symbolic expressions of their spiritual faith.” Instead, they fall back on tradition:
“But when the occasion came we found it the simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems.”
Hollingsworth’s Fall from Grace
The book’s most devastating moment comes when Hollingsworth finally recognizes what his obsessions have cost. He tells the narrator that since their friendship ended, he has “been busy with a single murderer”—meaning himself. This moment of self-awareness is so powerful that the narrator, despite everything, forgives him on the spot.
Hollingsworth never pursues his reform dreams. His fall is complete, and Hawthorne drives the point home with a reference to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress:
“I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan’s book of such, from the very gate of heaven there is a by-way to the pit!”
Even those who seem closest to virtue can take a wrong turn at the last moment.
Why This Still Matters
Years later, the narrator looks back on the Blithedale experiment with surprising fondness. Age has brought wisdom and tolerance for youthful excess:
“Often, however, in these years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer, appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a world!”
The Timeless Warning
Hawthorne understood something crucial about human nature: our highest ideals can become our greatest corruptions. Whether it’s 19th-century commune-building or today’s various utopian movements, the pattern remains the same. Well-meaning people with noble goals can create systems that ultimately serve their own egos rather than the common good.
The book isn’t a cynical dismissal of idealism—the narrator still cherishes the memory of that “beautiful scheme.” Instead, it’s a gentle warning about the gap between our aspirations and our nature, and the dangerous moment when we stop seeing that gap clearly.
In our current age of grand social experiments and revolutionary promises, The Blithedale Romance offers a timeless reminder: the road to hell is paved with good intentions, especially when those intentions become obsessions that blind us to their human cost.