Zenobia and Coverdale

"The Blithedale Romance" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a book told from the limited retrospective lens of Miles Coverdale, where he most often lingers on things that one might not consider important or necessary to the narrative. However, towards the end of the novel, we're treated with a moment between Coverdale and Zenobia, where we're offered the chance to witness Zenobia in her final moments before her suicide. This moment is integral to the story, I think, because it shows us not only Zenobia's last interaction with a person, but also a moment where Coverdale is focusing on what we would consider important.

Of course Coverdale begins the scene waxing poetically about how he finds himself sympathizing with Zenobia: "In simple truth, however, as Zenobia leaned her forehead against the rock, shaken with that tearless agony, it seemed to me that the self-same pang, with hardly mitigated torment, leaped thrilling from her heartstrings to my own." (109). But once Zenobia realizes that he had stayed with her, Coverdale spends the rest of the chapter focusing on her. They speak about the ballad they had once joked about, but now with the idea that it may end as a tragedy, and Coverdale hardly says more than a sentence per line of dialogue. Most of what he says are questions, besides the single line of "Hollingsworth has a heart of ice...He is a wretch!" (111), in which Zenobia responds to with a declaration that it was her fault she feels the way she does.

Zenobia speaks a lot in this chapter, in both melancholic and angry tones. The moral she says Coverdale should end his ballad with is "That the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's-breadth out of the beaten track...she goes all astray, and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards." (110), which is a comment later expanded upon as Zenobia says that it is her fault for the way things transpired between her and Hollingsworth. Later she goes on to say "Tell him [Hollingsworth] he has murdered me!" (111), after she takes more time to reflect on what had happened. The transition from believing she is responsible to blaming Hollingsworth is an important transition to witness, even if Coverdale doesn't comment on it directly.

After this shift in Zenobia's tone, Coverdale goes back to his waxing poetic: "How magnificently Zenobia looked as she said this! The effect of her beauty was even heightened by the over-consciousness and self-recognition of it, into which, I suppose Hollingsworth's scorn had driven her." (111), and though it would have been nice for him to comment on this shift, it was nice enough for him to wait until the end of the scene to start talking about how things appeared.