In "The Blithedaled Romance", Nathaniel Hawthorne recreates a time and place in America in which the debate over national identity is inevitably affected by cultural and ideological influences, as well as tastes and fashions, from across the Atlantic. Indeed, Hawthorne uses individual susceptibility to these forces as a way to delineate character and delve into personal relationships within the utopian community of Blithedale. In this sense, his first-person narrator Coverdale, a voracious reader of catholic tastes (the center-table, in his apartment, is “strewn with books and periodicals” [3:40]), is a serviceable guide to the community and, for all his passivity, a catalyst for revealing the formidable hurdles on its path.
