In which an analysis of Holgrave's idealistic character is attempted, in order to show how he is both typically American and ultimately doomed to fail.
The reform spirit is strong in this one. He is so idealistic he thinks of the world as “a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be.” He is naïve enough to think that the world in fact is ready to change for the better and that he will see such a golden era in his lifetime. He has this hopefulness about him, “that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew” [1].
Many have noted that this reform spirit is characteristic of American citizenship, but there is a dark side to it as well. The consequence of a capitalist economy in which one has the freedom to determine one’s own place in society means that as a people we are never satisfied. H.W. Bellows, writing in 1845, says that this “perpetual improvement of the outward condition,” a pursuit which is by definition unattainable, is responsible for “the excessive anxiety written in the American countenance.”
Temple interprets another nineteenth-century commenter, Thomas Low Nichols, as suggesting that “resistance to self-consummation is both a characteristic marker of American citizenship and an unremitting source of disappointment and disillusionment” [2]. This is the reason, Temple says, why the Blithedale experiment of The Blithedale Romance fails—because it is unable to remove itself from the framework of capitalist society.
This too may account for the skepticism of the narrator when describing Holgrave’s idealism. According to Temple, Hawthorne believed that the “lived expression of [human] nature is always-already irrevocably channeled, filtered through the various forms of law, gender inequity, compromise and capitulation that he views as constitutive of the social contract,” meaning that no reformer could ever shake off the framework of society, and thus must forever remain within the cycle of unconsummated striving [3].
Holgrave’s absolute belief in himself and his generation as the agents of a new world order once again puts him in the company of his fellow transcendentalists and reformers. The logic of Emerson in “Man the Reformer,” Bellows’ suggestions for leading a happier life, Hollingsworth and Coverdale’s approaches to reform in Blithedale all place reform deep within the individual spirit. “We make our lives and our selves better,” Temple writes, “not by changing the economic or political foundations of our society, but rather by reacquainting ourselves with the infinite promise of our imaginations” [4].
And yet the narrator of Seven Gables has far less faith in Holgrave’s individual promise than any of his kindred spirits. Holgrave’s “error,” he tells us, “lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit … and in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it” [5]. Thus with the gentle undermining of Holgrave’s idealism do we see how Hawthorne sets him up as a parody of those reform-spirited fellows of the day. Hawthorne destines him to be ineffectual not because of a flaw in his character but because for Hawthorne all such efforts to remake the world are essentially futile. Yet, he doesn’t fault Holgrave for trying.
[1] Hawthorne 124
[2] Temple 286
[3] ibid 297
[4] ibid 302
[5] Hawthorne 125
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