"Cuddle up and be my Little Clinging Vine:- Priscilla as Parasite or Victim.
Critics have mostly neglected Priscilla's character in the Blithedale Romance, and when they have paid any attention to her, they generally come up with some wild and seemingly unfounded ideas. Carol Weshoven looks at Priscilla's character as her prime example of child brides in American literature in her article, "America's Child Brides: The Price of a Bad Bargain."" Weshoven describes Priscilla thus: "From her initial intrusion into the Happy Valley, the ice maiden brings discord to the warm and vital fireside of the radical community. Helpless, capable of doing no work, passive and parasitic, Priscilla is an envoy of death and disease, a carrier of the secret corruption of American life- (151). Weshoven blames Priscilla for Hollingsworth's downfall (apparently hoping the reader of her essay has not read the book for himself), and says that she "exudes a veiled happiness' at her man's collapse- (153). Weshoven quotes "veiled happiness- from page 223, taking two words out of context to support her argument. Another article that deals extensively with Priscilla is Allan and Barbara Lefcowitz's article "Some Rents in the Veil: New Light on Priscilla and Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance."" The Lefcowitz's spend most of their time discussing Priscilla's sexual history, saying, "Certainly there is much to suggest a background of prostitution,"" (268) even asserting that Coverdale might have visited Priscilla when she was a prostitute. "Even more suggestive evidence of Coverdale's possible liaison at some point with a less than innocent Priscilla is intimated in the highly connotative scene where she visits his sick chamber at Blithedale- (268) The Lefcowitz's offer much evidence, very little of it convincing, that Priscilla has a dark sexual background. It seems to me to be too much of a stretch.
