Style
The novel is written from a first-person limited point of view and the narrator is Miles Coverdale. Coverdale's narrative style is erratic and dreamlike, bringing a strange form of syntax to the novel that is more Coverdale's than Hawthorne's. In a final chapter added after the original manuscript was completed but before publishing, Coverdale breaks the fourth wall and reveals that the writing takes place significantly after leaving Blithedale. He reveals the fates of the other characters from a still limited viewpoint.
The title identifies the novel as a romance, probably of the dark romantic type as Hawthorne (along with Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville) was considered a dark romantic writer. It displays the characteristic symbolism of Satan, magic and the supernatural frequently used in dark romantic literature. Themes of sin, guilt, and the betterment of humanity also appear in the novel through symbols like the veil and Brook Farm itself. These too are indicators of the book's Transcendentalist background and romantic nature.
Read more about this topic: The Blithedale Romance
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
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“A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils.”
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“I am so tired of taking to others
translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
to live it” white women
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