The Fate of the "Real Woman" in The Blithedale Romance The female characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Zenobia and Priscilla, differ in their portrayals of femininity. Zenobia begins as an independent character, who then surrenders to Hollingsworth's control, while Priscilla is always subservient to his desires. This determines how the male characters, Coverdale and Hollingsworth, both view women. Coverdale and Hollingsworth initially fall for Zenobia's charms, but both fall for Priscilla's docility. Zenobia represents female independence and Priscilla embodies female submission; Priscilla's triumph throws the male vote in this novel unanimously in favor of obedient women. Hollingsworth describes the True Woman: "She is the most admirable work of God, in her true place and character. Her place is at the side of man... All the separate action of woman is, and ever has been , and will always be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of its best and holiest qualities, devoid of all good effects and productive of intolerable evils [sic] The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is and never seeks to get past it!" (Hawthorne 122-3). Zenobia does not live up to Hollingsworth's definition of the True Woman. At the beginning of the novel she is known to be an intellectual, a writer. Such "separate action" as thinking and writing definitely offends the True Woman. This betrayal reaches its climax at Eliot's pulpit, where she vows to speak "for the widest liberty of woman" (Hawthorne 120). It is here that Hollingsworth describes the True Woman to whom Zenobia is so different. Will Priscilla, however, the epitome... middle of paper... ever be able to redeem them? (Hawthorne 124). However, by falling in love with Priscilla, a True Woman, he perpetuates the degradation of women through the ideal of the True Woman. Zenobia's inability to submit completely to the ideal of the True Woman condemns her to unhappiness. “All had failed her – prosperity, in the sense of the world, for her opulence was gone – the prosperity of the heart, in love” (Hawthorne 239). According to Coverdale, herself and much of society, there was nothing left for her to do but die. Even Priscilla, although a real woman, is condemned to a similar fate. Zenobia laments Priscilla's fate: "...you have a melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide and sad heart, where...the fire you have kindled may soon go out" (Hawthorne 220). It therefore seems that a woman of this time, true or not, was condemned to a life of misery.