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In the penultimate chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale offers a “moral” at the end of the narrative that specifically addresses Hollingsworth’s philanthropic and personal failures:
"…admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes.  It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process, but should render life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent, and insensibly influence over other hearts and other lives to the same blessed end." (348)

Coverdale’s “moral,” which implicates all of the reformers, including both Hollingsworth and himself, implies that an Edenic world created by individuals unwilling to acknowledge a deterministic universe ultimately proves destructive, both to the self and to others. It not only proves fatal for the individual—as evidenced in Hollingsworth’s “ruling passion,” Coverdale’s disillusionment, and Zenobia’s suicide—but it also proves fatal to the community, composed of “rich juices” symbolically depicted throughout the novel as fruit, specifically grapes and wine, that represent its members and their desires. When “pressed violently,” these “ruling passion[s]” follow an “unnatural process” that cannot accommodate a “life sweet, bland, and gently beneficent,” or one that accepts a predetermined course not governed by individual human will.

Coverdale’s journey, a journey not only temporally taken through seasons and through New England, but also through the self, reveals the novel’s overarching theme, that absolute free will cannot succeed in a predetermined universe. It is a lesson Coverdale offers to us but never understands; indeed, his uncertainty throughout the novel ironically undercuts the moral, as he continues to occupy a self-induced isolationist role at odds with the community spirit Hawthorne attaches to the moral.  In the Preface to the novel, before Coverdale’s narrative begins, Hawthorne ambiguously describes the romance as “essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact” (xxx-xxxi), foreshadowing Coverdale’s uncertain narrative voice and a framework that gestures towards the romance’s moral because it refuses to define its parameters absolutely. By treating the characters and their actions in the Preface with levity, even raising comic expectations that the novel’s tragic action belies, Hawthorne subverts the romance’s form but heightens its moral significance. He describes Hollingsworth as the “self-concentrated Philanthropist”; Zenobia as “the high-spirited Woman, bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex”; Priscilla as “the weakly Maiden, whose tremulous nerves endow her with Sibylline attributes”; and Coverdale as “the Minor Poet, beginning life with strenuous aspirations which die out with his youthful fervor” (xxxi).  Zenobia’s “bruising herself,” of course, is a grim understatement of her demise; the “weakly Maiden,” Priscilla, unlike any other character, proves stronger than her early “Sybilline” description initially affords; and Coverdale’s role as the “Minor Poet,” implies that he has a “minor” role in the novel when in fact his first person narrative moves the reader through his isolation, perceptions, and, most importantly, his psychological quest for “the secret which was hidden even from themselves” (229)—a quest that, for him, remains unfulfilled.

Coverdale’s often unreliable narrative voice, along with the incongruous early portraits of the novel’s central characters, allows Hawthorne to overturn typical romance expectations, which, like allegory, proposes absolute characters and absolute resolutions often clearly defined and recognizable through symbolic gestures and character traits. Hawthorne’s entire aim, of course, is to moralize against extremism, even certainties about human nature and life, and his characters, symbols, and language deny any concrete conclusions the romance formulation establishes. He achieves this reversal not only through Coverdale’s unreliable narrative voice, “tainted” by his own conscious and unconscious desires, voyeuristic impulses, and final inability to save Zenobia, the “damsel-in-distress” figure ironically cast as the strongest, most self-possessed character in the novel, but also through ironic foreshadowing symbols, images, and names given by a narrator who grapples, even in his retrospective narrative, with what the symbols he describes ultimately mean.  Hawthorne, then, establishes a pattern in the Preface and in the opening chapters that delineates certain characters, their functions, and their roles, but he purposefully reconfigures this pattern to emphasize a lesson none of the characters, save Priscilla, understand until tragedy strikes.

Instead of presenting a clearly-defined quest answered and achieved at the tale’s end, Hawthorne employs gothic, supernatural elements that include the mysterious and phantasmagoric Veiled Lady, the devil-like Westervelt, and the allure of the tempting femme fatale, Zenobia, to create ambiguities that begin with Coverdale’s nostalgic and misleading tone. Early in chapter two, Coverdale reveals the initial quest on which he has embarked as one where he “quitted…comfortable quarters, and plunged into the heart of the pitiless snowstorm in quest of a better life” (9). His “brother” reformer Hollingsworth pursues this quest, for him “the reformation of the world” (12), exclusively, creating a dissonant note in an otherwise ideal world away from the “society that shackled” (13) the individual soul. Their journey begins as winter chill gives way to the seasonal warmth and verdant “Paradise” (8) that Hawthorne associates with Bilthedale and with Coverdale’s recreations of this utopia. Already, however, Coverdale’s erotic descriptions of Zenobia, a counterfeit name that introduces affectation into this natural habitat of fraternal comrades, introduces “corrupt” desires at odds with the idealistic world he envisions. As Coverdale remembers: “The presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia…” (25-6) made “counterfeit” not just by her presence but also by Coverdale’s irrepressible human fallibility—his own voyeuristic obsession with Zenobia’s sexual past and relationships with Hollingsworth and Priscilla.  
       
This obsession overtakes Coverdale, and, combined with his inability to discern reality from dreams, creates the overarching uncertainty governing his alternately accusatory and self-deprecating tone. Coverdale describes himself “hunted by chimeras” (332) in the woods of a changed Blithedale, but these “chimeras” have “hunted” him from the beginning, as he vacillates between condemnation of others, particularly Zenobia and Hollingsworth, and condemnation of himself. He establishes a pattern of blame, targeted most stringently towards Zenobia at the beginning of his narrative, when he imagines her as Pandora (29), a destructive, mythic figure Hesiod blames for misery in the world. In the end, of course, Zenobia has no agency except to end her own life, a seemingly predestined event foreshadowed in Coverdale’s and Hollingsworth’s condemnation of her, most tragically at Eliot’s pulpit.

Rather, the magnetic Zenobia, destined by her name as the ruination of Blithedale, is more sinned against than sinning—not rich and therefore not wanted by Hollingsworth. Neither, however, is she the ominous and mythic “Pandora,” whose curiosity has disastrous consequences. Instead, it is Coverdale’s curiosity, his desire to uncover the secrets surrounding Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla that lead to his realization that Blithedale remains an illusion, an imperfect realization of false dreams constructed with the “dust of deluded generations” (183), or the Puritans and their failed “city on a hill.” Just as Miles Coverdale’s name implies the lengths, or “miles” he would travel to “uncover” these secrets, so too does his curiosity, not Zenobia’s, foreshadowed in the “fallen leaves” (326), help to break the “broken bubble” (324) that is, as Zenobia states, a “foolish dream” (324).  Although she courageously accuses Hollingsworth of a vainglorious concentration on the self, helping to forward the romance’s moral, her daring individualism also results in a punishing rejection by Hollingsworth and by the novel in perhaps the greatest ironic reversal in the romance, given Zenobia’s strong character: her suicide.

Zenobia embodies a system of complex symbols and remains the most difficult character to understand; certainly her character remains the most uncertain and mysterious one. She always appears with an exotic flower in her hair, even though Coverdale likens both Zenobia and Priscilla to flowers erotically cast according to nature’s “sensual influence” (142). Although Priscilla first enters Blithedale a pale shadow compared with Zenobia, “her cheeks bloom like two damask roses” (121), or with sexual promise unrealized except in Coverdale’s heightened imagination. She replaces her “hot house” (59) flowers, once wilted, with fresh ones, and while Hawthorne associates Zenobia with sexual promise, knowledge, and images, contrasting her “dark, powerful figure” with Priscilla’s “fair” one (108), it is to foreshadow her “dark, powerful” death even more than her Eve-like sexual allure. Indeed, though Hawthorne creates an Una and Duessa pair in Priscilla and Zenobia in the beginning of the romance, associating Zenobia with the woods (132) and with Westervelt, the most clearly defined figure representing the devil, he deconstructs these associations by the end. Her mature beauty, metaphorically depicted as a “flame” (143), burns out, doused by the river in which she dies.
Instead, Zenobia gestures towards the romance’s moral lesson before her death by identifying Blithedale and its purpose as “broken” by Hollingsworth’s selfishness—a greater sin, she argues, than any she commits: “playing at philosophy and progress,” she asserts, is “the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system” (324). Coverdale, horrified by the possibility that Zenobia’s hands reject rather than pray to God in her final death-posture, blames Zenobia at the beginning of the narrative for breaking the “illusion” (25) of Blithedale because, even at the end, he remains unwilling to acknowledge his sins, his culpability as much as hers or Hollingsworth’s. Coverdale’s presentation of her sexual presence, mysterious history with Westervelt, and rejection of Priscilla implies that she participates in the “masquerade” (26), or sham of the materialistic and therefore evil world. But Coverdale’s early portrait of Zenobia as sexually charged and his condemnation of her as the one who “caused [their] heroic enterprise to show like an illusion” (25) reveals instead a more genuine character than her early portrait indicates.

Despite her “counterfeit” names and appearance, she dispels the idyllic pastoral created in Blithedale not by her sexually “corrupt” aura, but by her understanding that no “true system” (324) can work when “pressed violently” (348) by absolutism. Ironically, she is destroyed by her own absolute passions for Hollingsworth. The “one true system” she believes still exists, despite Blithedale’s failure, signifies that, while she may not pursue the same absolutist goal Hollingsworth does, she pursues him absolutely, even to her death, making her just as culpable for Blithedale’s failure as him. This individual pursuit of one’s passions, or one’s own will, reinforces the idea that human beings cannot create a perfect world apart from corruption, and, furthermore, this perfect world has a predetermined course that does not allow individual free will. Coverdale struggles throughout the novel with this realization. It forces him to acknowledge life’s pre-determined course, with Zenobia’s suicide symbolizing the death of the reformers’ early absolutist vision of self-will, which breaks Hollingsworth, who is plagued with guilt for his role in her death. Just as Blithedale cannot exist because of Hollingsworth’s ultimatum that Coverdale must “be with [him]…or be against [him]! There is no third choice…” (192), so too can Zenobia no longer function in a world that has collapsed literally and ideologically.

By contrast, Priscilla, described as “a leaf floating on the dark current of events, without influencing them by her own choice or plan” (240), understands this mystery from the beginning. The “shadow has not reached” (203) her yet, and she balks at the uncertainty Coverdale contemplates early in the novel, foreshadowing a “blithe” attitude that redefines what Blithedale could have been—a community of accepting members, accepting of themselves, of others, and of a benevolent determinism. Her character, “blown about” (245), embodies the moral Coverdale realizes only after he loses contact with any community, as he wanders the world without a community or a role, even as a poet. Coverdale describes Priscilla’s unconditional love for Hollingsworth “like casting a lower into a sepulchre” (141-2) because each represents two ideological sides, with Hollingsworth asserting a decidedly absolute will and Priscilla asserting no will whatsoever, stating “I have no free will” (245). Her deterministic vision radically revises the goals Coverdale expresses in the quest for a better society made better by individual wills brought together to effect change. As Coverdale undergoes his “mighty struggle” of spirit, he realizes that “our souls, after all, are not our on. We convey a property with them to those with whom we associate.” It is, finally, an “abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves” (276). These views advocate the determinism Hawthorne constructs as our need to submit the self to a hidden and mysterious force governing the world.

In perhaps the most striking image patterns of the novel, ones depicted in saloon paintings associated with Old Moodie, who haunts the text as the representative both of riches lost and riches gained, Coverdale looks at several pictures that encompass the lessons Hawthorne uncovers in the romance. In the first several paintings, Coverdale sees lifelike images of deer, salmon, ducks, and other animals and food the “hungry painter” (249) depicts as ones that “thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial” (250). In the next painting, Coverdale sees “gallant revellers…drinking their wine…quaffing joyously, quaffing forever, with inaudible laughter and song, while the champagne bubbled immortally…” (250). The last painting, “in an obscure corner of the saloon,” offers a markedly different picture of “a ragged, bloated New England toper, stretched out on a bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of drunkenness. The death-in-life was too well portrayed” (250). Hawthorne presents these pictures as images of two distinct visions. One offers the possibility for a community of people able to live joyously together, drinking their “rich juices” (348) with conviviality and eating together in a “warm, cheerful, and substantial” world with each other. The other features an isolated soul, one who drinks his wine too absolutely. He cannot participate in the revelers’ communal joy or its warmth.

The former painting depicts the vision of community Hawthorne advances as the answer to the implied question Coverdale’s moral proposes: how to establish community in a predetermined world. The latter painting only results in isolation, in the “death-in-life” state even Coverdale cannot escape at the end. The “bubbled” world encapsulated in the revelers’ painting offers a momentarily glimpse into the ending Hawthorne does not give the romance. Rather, he leaves us with the last painting’s lesson, the “broken bubble” that not only describes Blithedale, Hollingsworth, and Zenobia, it also describes Coverdale, who sits in judgement on others, even in his memory, and leaves himself, like the “New England toper,” in isolation. If, in Hawthorne’s view, we should accept a predetermined course, acknowledging that we have no free will and no possibility for a Paradisiacal world devoid of corruption, then we should also learn to share together in a communal spirit that ultimately defeats absolutism and isolation.