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Article: A Utopia of "Spheres and Sympathies": Science and Society in The Blithedale Romance and at Brook Farm.
- Article from:
- Utopian Studies
- Article date:
- March 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Society for Utopian Studies. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Historical and fictional Utopias converge at Brook Farm, where Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member in 1841, and in Hawthorne's novel of 1852, The Blithedale Romance, which he partly based on his experience there. Scholars, though acknowledging this link, have largely acceded to the author's claim in the novel's preface that the "affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the Romance, nor does he put forward the slightest pretension to illustrate a theory" (1). Critics of the novel have, with a few exceptions, dissented from this position only by reading Blithedale as a roman a clef, in which the feminist Zenobia may stand for Margaret Fuller, who visited ...