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Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: The Theory of the Romance and the Use of the New England Situation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John C. Stubbs
John C. Stubbs*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana
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Abstract

To write The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne drew on mid-nineteenthcentury theories of the prose romance and the central situation of New England romances. The romance was distinguished from the novel by the idea of artistic distance; romancers wanted to set human experience at a distance from their readers' world so that the meaning of the experience would be more clear. To get the distance exactly right, they balanced three sets of opposites: verisimilitude and ideality; the natural and the marvelous; and history and fiction. Hawthorne discussed each of the balances and used them as part of his conception of the form of The Scarlet Letter. The central situation of most contemporary romances about Puritanism provided him with the conflict of the “fair Puritan” and the “black Puritan.” Hester is his “fair Puritan” whose capacity for feeling is opposed to the reasoned but harsh justice of his “black Puritan,” Chillingworth. These two characters in their roles as types define the extreme sides of the moral argument Hawthorne synthesizes in the complex characterization of Dimmesdale.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 5 , October 1968 , pp. 1439 - 1447
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1. Four modern scholars have treated aspects of the romance in America: G. Harrison Orians, “The Romance Ferment After Waverley,” AL, m (Jan. 1932), 408–431; William Char-vat, “Fiction,” The Origins of American Critical Thought: 1810–1835 (Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 134–163; Alexander Cowie, Introduction, The Yemassee by William Gilmore Simms (New York, 1937), pp. ix-xxxv; and Richard Chase, The American Novel and. Its Tradition (New York, 1957). In particular, Hawthorne's critical attitudes toward fiction and the romance have been tabulated and systematized in the following essays: Charles Howell Foster, “Hawthorne's Literary Theory,” PMLA, viii (March 1942), 241–254; Roy Harvey Pearce, “Hawthorne and the Twilight of Romance,” YR, xxxvn (Spring 1948), 487–506; Jesse Bier, “Hawthorne on the Romance: His Prefaces Related and Examined,” MP, mi (Aug. 1955), 17–24; and Arlin Turner, “Reality in the Romance,” Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1961), pp. 66–84. Virtually all these critics use the eclectic method of gathering various quotations about the romance. My method, quite different, is to discuss the principle of artistic distance created by the balance of opposites that figures in all the various definitions of romance.

2. In Lyle Wright's American Fiction, 1774–1850 (San Marino, Calif., 1948), only twenty-two works entitled romances are recorded as published before 1840, but for the period 1840–45, forty are listed, and for the period 1846–50, seventy-one.

3. Of the total of one hundred and eleven romances known published 1840–50, fifty-eight have specified in their titles that their subject is linked with American history. An example is William Henry Carpenter's Claiborne the Rebel: A Romance of Maryland, Under the Propriety (1845).

4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, The Centenary Edition (Columbus, Ohio, 1965), p. 1. Hawthorne's differentiation echoes Sir Walter Scott's distinction in “An Essay on Romance” between the “marvellous and uncommon incidents” in the romance and the “events … accommodated to the ordinary train of human events” in the novel and William Gilmore Simms's distinction in The Yemassee between the “possibility” of a situation in the romance and the “probability” of a situation in the novel. See Scott, The Miscellaneous Prose Works (Edinburgh, 1827), vi, 155–156, and Simms, The Yemassee (New York, 1835), I, vi-vii.

5. Port Folio, 4th Ser., ii (Aug. 1816), 161.

6. Edward BulwerLytton, “The Critic,” Monthly Chronicle, I (March 1838), 43.

7. “Drowne's Wooden Image,” The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Introductory Notes by George Parsons Lalhrop (Cambridge, Mass., 1883), n, 354.

8. Our Old Home, Complete Works, vii, 165–166.

9. The Marble Faun, Complete Works, vi, 57.

10. The Scarlet Letter, The Centenary Edition (Columbus, Ohio, 1962), p. 37.

11. The Blithedale Romance and Panshawe, The Centenary Edition (Columbus, Ohio, 1964), p. 1.

12. “The Imagination as Mirror,” American Renaissance (New York, 1962), pp. 253–264.

13. “The Haunted Mind,” Complete Works, I, 344.

14. The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story (London, 1777), p. iv.

15. Scott, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” Foreign Quarterly Review, i (July 1827), 62–64.

16. The Monastery, Waverley Novels, Opus Magnum Edition (Edinburgh, 1829–32), xviii, xiii, xviii.

17. Lytton, A Strange Story, The Novels and Romances of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart., M.P. (London, 1863), XI, vi-vii.

18. “Two Uncollected Reviews by Hawthorne,” ed. Randall Stewart, NEQ, ix (Sept. 1936), 506.

19. “The Threefold Destiny,” Complete Works, I, 527.

20. Charles Brockden Brown, “The Difference between History and Romance,” Monthly Magazine and American Review, ii (April 1800), 251.

21. “All the attempts to blend history with romance in America, have been comparatively failures, (and perhaps fortunately,) since the subjects are too familiar to be treated with the freedom that the imagination absolutely requires.” James Fenimore Cooper, Notions o] the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (Philadelphia, 1828), II, 111–112.

22. Waverley Novels, xvi, xxxiv.

23. Ibid., p. xxxix.

24. Here Lytton differed from Scott. He argued that the romancer could concentrate on the “inward” lives of important figures rather than their “public and historical” lives. See Lytton, Harold, Novels and Romances, vii, ix.

25. The Fortunes of Nigel, Waverley Novels, xxvr, vi-vii.

26. “Sir William Phips,” Complete Works, xii, 227.

27. I have restricted this list to works that are labeled romances in their titles.

28. The Witch of New England; A Romance (Philadelphia, 1824), pp. 30–31.

29. John Lothrop Motley, Merry-mount; A Romance of the Massachusetts Colony (Boston and Cambridge, Mass., 1849), i, 3.

30. Ibid., i, 17.

31. “The Tongue of Flame: The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Tex., 1957), pp. 90–118. Male develops the metaphor of the Tongue of Flame as the thematic center of The Scarlet Letter.