Nathaniel Hawthorne

The moral . . . as drawn from Hollingsworth's characters and errors is . . . that, admitting what is called Philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful . . . to society at large, it is perilous to the individual, whole ruling passion . . . it thus becomes. It ruins . . . the heart. . . . From the very gate of Heaven, there is a by-way to the pit (243).

Clearly, there are characters who disagree with this estimation, including Hollingsworth himself, at least up to the point of his withdrawal in failure from society. Cloverdale also holds the view that the experiment at the Blithedale farm was a noble one. He looks back to his earlier idealistic days with fondness, but he has clearly lost the belief that society can be perfected, or even profoundly improved, through the efforts of human beings who are so seriously flawed both as individuals and as members of any would-be reformist group.

Certainly Hawthorne does not believe that the social and/or political environment has no impact on human goodness or evil. The views of

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age of the novel: "Fabrizio was too much in love and too earnest a believer to have recourse to suicide. He hoped to meet Clelia again in a better world, but had too much intelligence not to feel that there was much for which he must first atone" (488). There are two messages in such a statement. First, the author is making clear through Fabrizio that human love can triumph, no matter how oppressive and corrupt and evil the surrounding political and social environment. Second, this does not mean that the individual human being is somehow rendered beyond responsibility for the damage he or she does as a result of participating in the ongoing corruption. Love may triumph, in other words, but this does not mean that Stendahl is an idealist who therefore believes that such love erases all or any of the evil that individuals do. Still, when we consider that Fabrizio does not merely pay lip service to his need for atonement, but puts his words into action in righting the wrongs he has done, we can see that Stendahl does believe that love can alter the behavior of an individual, even though it is highly doubtful that it can significantly alter the political or social system. Although many if not most of the characters in the novel ar
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Blithedale Romance, Charterhouse Parma, Russia England, Author's Note, Fabrizio Clelia, Western Eyes, York Penguin, political system, Governments Governments, Englishman Razumov's, social political, political social, individual human, human heart, york penguin, mean individual human, system conrad, western eyes, , opportunity believe, political system conrad, reader opportunity believe,
Approximate Word count = 1592
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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