HAWTHORNE AND THE ROMANCE
From Pennell, Melissa McFarland. The Student Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Greenwood, 1999. pp. 14-16.
The novel as a genre was also a fairly new literary form in Hawthorne’s day, having emerged at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Early novels used a variety of approaches to narrative in their attempts to represent life and experience within fiction. Some novels were written in the third person using a narrator closely identified with the author. Others followed the epistolary form, consisting of letters exchanged between characters, through which an author could provide insights into the characters’ thoughts and states of mind. As the genre developed, distinctions were made by writers and critics between the novel and the romance.
The novel represented the realities of life for its characters, capturing their mannerisms and behaviors as they interacted with those around them. It emphasized the nature of the social structure in which characters lived and explored their life in time present. It attempted to achieve verisimilitude, the “semblance of truth” or a “lifelike” quality in its characters, setting, and events. These qualities contributed to the emergence of the novel of manners in the early nineteenth century and to the emphasis on social realism in later decades.
In contrast, the romance may include details that make the characters and setting believable and even realistic, but it does not strive toward verisimilitude. Instead, the romance presents events and situations that are improbable or unlikely, often set in the distant past or in a remote place. The writer of romance incorporates elements of the supernatural or mysterious within the narrative to expand the possibilities of fiction beyond the everyday. He or she may also explore the nature of both the imagination and the unconscious through the use of dreams, symbols, and myths. Today many critics downplay the differences between the novel and romance, indicating that the terms are often used interchangeably during the early nineteenth century.
In prefaces to his longer works, Hawthorne draws distinctions between the nature of his fiction and the novel. He explains in Seven Gables that he wishes “to claim a certain latitude” for his work in terms of its material and style of presentation. He states that the novel must be minutely faithful to the daily realities that people see around them, whereas Hawthorne seeks freedom to go beyond the everyday, to consider possibilities as well as probabilities. In Hawthorne’s view, the romance allows a writer to enter into what he calls in The Scarlet Letter a “neutral territory.” In that realm, the writer can “mingle” or merge the actual and the ideal. Calling his work “romance” allows Hawthorne to acknowledge that it is a product of the imagination while asserting the validity of the connections it makes between the tangible and the abstract.
Aware that earlier writers had distinguished the romance from history, drawing a line between fiction and fact, Hawthorne seeks ways to suggest that truth stands behind fiction, even though fiction is the product of the imagination. He also wants his readers to be aware that fiction may draw upon the record of history, but is not limited by it. Hawthorne questions whether the historical romance can go beyond a simple retelling of history. In an 1846 review, he writes, “we cannot help feeling that the real treasures of [William Gilmore Simms’s] subject have escaped the author’s notice. The themes suggested by him, viewed as he views them, would produce nothing but historical novels, cast in the same worn out mould that has been in use these thirty years, and which it is time to break up and fling away” (Stewart, “Contributions” 331). Three years later, Hawthorne puts himself to the test as he writes The Scarlet Letter. Drawing upon the New England past as he has come to understand it, Hawthorne uses his narrative to explore issues such as the nature of passion, revenge, and guilt, as well as the power and meaning of symbols. Such concerns go beyond what the historical record alone can reveal.
The three romances that Hawthorne writes after The Scarlet Letter make less use of the distancing effect of time, though The Marble Faun does take advantage of the remoteness of location in its Italian setting. In the “Preface” to Seven Gables, Hawthorne states that he wishes to link the present with a “by-gone time” whose “legendary mist” will contribute to a “picturesque effect” for the reader (351). His reference to “mist,” which can cloud or interfere with vision, suggests his desire to leave the reader with impressions of truth rather than precise renderings of fact. He also cautions that romances do not teach direct lessons, but work upon the reader “through a far more subtle process” (352). Likewise, in the “Preface” to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne admits that he has drawn upon his experiences at Brook Farm to “give a more lifelike tint” to his narrative, but that he is not writing its history. He asserts that romancers in America lack access to a culturally accepted mythic past or “Faery Land” in which to set their works to take advantage of “strange enchantment” (633). Therefore, they must create their own enchantment through the treatment of material.
When he writes of the advantages of the Italian setting in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne again makes reference to the challenge that faces the romancer in America. He claims that in America there “is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight” (854). Yet his own tales and romances contribute to the shaping of a mythic American past with its shadows, wrongs, and mysteries as well as its simple daylight. While he claims that it will be “very long” before American writers of romance will find “congenial and easily handled themes in . . . the annals of our stalwart republic” (854), Hawthorne paves the way and provides direction for doing so.