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 chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I concluded that I was skilled, however poorly, at only one thing: marriage. And so I set about the business of selling myself and two children to some unsuspecting man who might think me a desirable second-hand mate, a man of good means and disposition willing to support another man’s children in some semblance of the style to which they were accustomed. My heart was not in the chase, but I was tired and there was no alternative. I could not afford freedom.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)