Nathaniel Hawthorne`s the Blithedale romance details the lives of several characters who live through the creation and eventual failure of a utopian commune called Blithedale.
Blithedale is founded upon a series of percepts that would be considered transcendentalist. Transcendentalism was an important and persuasive theory in the 19th century often associated with ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalist believed that it was possible to create a system that would allow humanity to live in absolute harmony with nature and one another. Although Nathaniel Hawthorn was in certain ways sympathetic possibility of putting their ideas into practice. Based on his own experiences at a utopian farm in the 1840, Hawthorne wrote The Blithedale Romance in order to show the deficiency of much of transcendentalist beliefs. Hawthorn uses the experiences of his characters in Blithedale critique transcendentalist ideas, such as romantic idealism, ideal communities, and the relationship of self to others, the possibility of communal soul, and the possibility of an idealized pastoral world existing in contemporary society. Hawthorne satirically demonstrates the absorb naivety of these transcendentalist notions through the lens of his novel, showing that his characters unswerving devotion to idealized concepts ultimately fails to achieve real world results and that , in many cases, this idealism in fact leads to tragic disaster.
While most of the characters begin their stay at Blithedale strongly believing in the romantic ideals that underlie the commune`s belief system, at the end of the novel, these beliefs are dramatically shaken. In fact, some of the characters begin to wonder what the worth of such idealistic devotions could be in the first place. Faced with a growing disillusionment with Blithedale , the loss of her family fortunes, and depressed by her unrequited love of