Framing bad art: A semiotic view of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance has been criticized contemporaneously and subsequently by such figures as F. O. Matthiessen, Mark Van Doren, and Rudolph Von Abele for its lack of romanticism or realism, depending upon the critic. This thesis uses a semiotic approach to explore Hawthorne's deconstruction of his first-person narrator, Miles Coverdale, and the resulting confusion among critics regarding authorial control in what some call his "anti-romance." Coverdale, as a detached artist, is responsible for reality's misinterpretation and misrepresentation, somewhat lampooning Transcendentalism. The triadic relationship of object, sign, and interpretant modeled by Charles Sanders Peirce is discussed using Liszka, Sebeok, Eco, and others and is complimented by the Umwelt Theory of Jakob von Uexkull to explain Coverdale's faulty symbolism. Hawthorne's "The Custom House" is also used to indicate his concerns for artistic limitation and the loss of an individual in a static community as he later fictionalizes in Blithedale.