The Blithedale Romance

"I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!"

The four-cornered commune plot (Coverdale / Hollingsworth / Zenobia / Priscilla) gathers tension through the failed asylum alliance and snaps at Midnight on the riverbank; the romance-line closes only with Coverdale's belated confession, so plot scores 78.

Zenobia--whom I had never before seen, important as was her place in our enterprise--Zenobia entered the parlor.

Zenobia's imperious arrival with imperial pseudonym and warm hand, Hollingsworth's "low, stern, and grave" voice, Coverdale the self-effacing poet-narrator, and Priscilla the veiled seamstress-singer carry the four-cornered romance, so cast scores 88.

I was little better than an icicle, and began to be suspicious that I had caught a fearful cold.

Prose-poem atmosphere (Veiled Lady, northeaster ride, farmhouse fire) and long middle-tableaux (Eliot's Pulpit, the Hotel drawing-room) slow the four-cornered romance; only Midnight's river search supplies plot pulse, so pace scores 76.

It was white, with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of a cloud; and, falling over the wearer from head to foot, was supposed to insulate her from the material world, from time and space, and to endow her with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit.

Veiled Lady image, the nor'easter "blithe tones of brotherhood," and the confession's typographic trailing-off rewrite Romantic cadence for American prose, so prose scores 92.

A family of the old Pilgrims might have swung their kettle over precisely such a fire as this, only, no doubt, a bigger one; and, contrasting it with my coal-grate, I felt so much the more that we had transported ourselves a world-wide distance from the system of society that shackled us at breakfast-time.

April farmhouse, snowdrifts, Eliot's Pulpit rock, and the riverside where Zenobia's slipper is found ground the commune in 1841 New England; the séance parlor and lecture-circuit bracket the pastoral, so world scores 84.

"Mr. Coverdale," said he softly, "can I speak with you a moment?"

The Veiled Lady prologue + Old Moodie under the gate immediately install concealment and romantic errand; one of Hawthorne's most insidious first-chapter hook combinations, so hook scores 86.

The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit.

Hawthorne transposes Brook Farm's collapse into a first-person retrospective that names Fourierism by name; the Veiled Lady frame folds 1840s séance-fad into the romance, so innov scores 88.

I left Blithedale within the week after Zenobia's death, and went back thither no more. The whole soil of our farm, for a long time afterwards, seemed but the sodded earth over her grave.

Coverdale's bachelor retrospection + the confession's typographic dash-trail ("I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!") closes the commune on a chastened, ironic note rather than a tragic one, so ending scores 80.