Veiled Ladies: Toward a History of Antebellum Entertainment

Abstract When she is not at Blithedale, the Priscilla of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance has a career. She makes public appearances as the Veiled Lady: clothed in a silvery white veil, which purportedly insulates her from terrestrial reality, she goes onstage as a human conduit to occult knowledge, giving sibylline answers to the questions her audience puts. Hawthorne, we know, felt final dissatisfaction with this figure of his creation. When Blitlzedale was finished but unnamed he considered “The Veiled Lady” as a possible title for the book but ruled that “I do not wish to give prominence to that feature of the Romance.”1 But would he or no, prominence is just what Blithedale gives the Veiled Lady. The book begins with Miles Coverdale “returning to my bachelor-apartments” from “the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady” (5). Its plot machinations-unusually intricate for a Hawthorne novel-all tum on moves to rescue Priscilla from or to re-imprison her in her onstage role. And if any figure in Blithedale might be said to be figurally belabored, it is the Veiled Lady, this book’s prime site of symbolic overdevelopment. The question I want to put in this essay is what, historically, is on Hawthorne’s mind when he writes Blithedale in 1851-52, and by extension, what cultural situation a novelist would have had to address at this moment of American literary history. If I begin with the Veiled Lady, it is on the assumption that she embodies answers to questions of this sort.