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Article: Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance".(19th-century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne)(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- March 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Heldref Publications. 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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Ever since the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, readers have been prone to look on the novel as a roman clef of some sort or other. Despite the author's protestations in the preface that the characters "are entirely fictitious" (2), critics have, over the years, speculated about possible real-life models for the characters. Most famously, Zenobia has been taken to be a thinly veiled portrayal of Margaret Fuller.' As to the book's narrator, Miles Coverdale, most critics agree that he is primarily modeled on Hawthorne himself: The many correspondences between Hawthorne's experiences at Brook Farm and Coverdale's at Blithedale bear ample witness ...