“I saw a concourse of strange figures”: The Masque, Voyeurism, and Coverdale's Self-Consciousness in The Blithedale Romance

Hawthorne employs the pastoral, rustic elements of this courtly form of entertainment in "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" and then fully develops them in The Blithedale Romance. Besides this short story, other works by Hawthorne invoke the masque tradition; specifically, George W. Woodberry notes that "A Select Party," "The Hall of Fantasy," "The Intelligence Office," and "A Virtuosos Collection" are all "masque-like inventions" because of their adherence to an "allegorizing model" full of "pictorial and dramatic effects" (140). [...]a letter from Anna Parsons at Brook Farm indicates that she brought "the visible presence of [Charles] Fourier," that is, his ghost, into a room during a clairvoyant session (qtd. in Lang 335). [...]Bridget Bennett argues that "a series of sacral performances or sacred theater took place in the period that immediately preceded the events of 1848 that are usually cited as the origin of modern spiritualism" (115). The masque genre, with its courtly origins, is linked to the emerging nineteenth-century American bourgeoisie and upper class. [...]Hawthorne is arguably following a particular tradition from the sixteenth-century court of Henry VIII, whereby the nobleman for whom the masque is performed is asked by the courtly entertainers to join in the dance and musical tableau. [...]Hawthornes interest in masque tradition and its conventions dovetail with his interrogation of the possibilities of nineteenth-century audience and spectatorship; he synthesizes sixteenth-century English masque history with this nineteenth-century cultural shift in audience within this Boston scene and throughout the novel.