nature, Congreve in the preface to his otherwise-forgotten Incognita (1692), Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1795). In a preface to the revised edition of The Yemassee (1853), Hawthorne's Southern contemporary William Gilmore Simms made an elaborate case for the romance as the modern substitute for the epic. Important for Simms, as for Hawthorne, is the fact that the romance allows an extravagance of presentation: rather than subjecting 'itself to what is known, or even what is probable, it grasps at the possible.'
Despite the tendency of some nineteenth-century reviewers to use the terms romance and novel interchangeably (as Nina Baym demonstrates in her study of reviews and readers), Hawthorne could and did assume an established distinction between the two kinds of fiction in his preface to Seven Gables. Later descriptions of the romance as an identifiable kind of narrative support the idea of breaking away from the commonplace as a fundamental characteristic. Having already declared his affinity for the romance in Mardi (1849), Melville came to think of fiction itself as expansive, replete with wonder: 'It -73- is with fiction as with religion,' he wrote in The Confidence-Man (1857); 'it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.' The metaphor of a 'tie' brings to mind Henry James's well-known analogy of 'the balloon of experience' in his preface to the New York edition of The American (1909). The balloon, according to James, carries us into a world of imagination; but it is tethered to the earth by 'a rope of remarkable length' that locates us and assures us where we are. If the rope is cut, 'we are at large and unrelated.' Ever concerned with technique, James concludes that 'the art of the romancer' is to cut the cable undetected, with 'insidious' craft. James's balloon analogy has long been a favorite among students of the romance. But his preface to The American offers an equally provocative and even more precise description of the form. James explicitly disavows the popular idea of the strange and the far as crucial aspects of the romance; they simply represent the unknown, which the increasing range of our experience may convert to the known. Nor is a romantic temperament in a character basic to this kind of narrative (while Emma Bovary is a romantic, 'nothing less resembles a romance' than Flaubert's Madame Bovary). The romance, he goes on to say, explores a reality that 'we never can directly know,' no matter our resolve. It 'deals' with a special kind of experience — and here we come to the essence of James's definition — 'experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it' by way of social context.
What emerges from this assemblage of definitions is a sense of the romance as an enabling theory of narrative equipped with memorable and facilitating metaphors. What comes from the theory is a mode of fiction that presents extravagance and courts the 'disengaged' (in James's term), a fiction of intensity that feeds on caricature and seeks to confront the absolute. The consequence is a diverse set of narratives, gothic, magical, and psychological (frequently tending toward the allegorical and symbolic), unparalleled as expressive vehicles of revenge. In the work of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, one finds achievement of high and diverse order but none more eloquent than in studies of revenge empowered by the narrative energies of romance. -74-
Throughout his twenty years of writing tales before the publication of The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne worked tentatively and at times clumsily to release the imagination for the purposes of his art. He spent a career finding ways to enter what he once called 'the kingdom of possibilities.' In the context of a society suspicious of imaginative indulgence, his commitment to the imagination was cautious, even intermittent: what he called 'the hot, hard practical life of America' never ceased to threaten his creative efforts. Out of his difficulties he wrote a number of tales dramatizing the plight of the imagination in a hostile environment — among them, 'The Artist of the Beautiful' (1844), and 'The Snow- Image' (1850) — and developed strategies of shaping and presentation that did much to define the nature of the romance as he saw it. (It may be well to note that although the tale is not simply a short form of the romance, any more than the short story is an abbreviated form of the novel, it does deal with the kind of expansive reality typically found in the romance. In his tales as in his romances, Hawthorne worked to set the reader apart from what he continually called the 'actual' world.)
Each of Hawthorne's major romances contains a preface explaining that his kind of fiction requires a domain of its own if it is to flourish. In 'The Custom-House' sketch, which serves as an introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne formulates the metaphor of 'a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, as we have seen, he explains that the latitude of fashion and material afforded by the romance is congenial to his imagination. His concern in The Blithedale Romance (1852) is 'to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel,' where his characters will not be exposed to direct comparison 'with the actual events of real lives.' The difficulty of creating fiction without access to a 'Faery Land,' he admits, 'has always pressed heavily' upon him. The same perspective evokes his statement concerning the romance and America in the preface to The Marble Faun (1860). Italy, he explains, afforded him 'a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America.' -75-
As much as any of his prefatory statements, Hawthorne's sketch 'The Haunted Mind' (1835) suggests the nature of the 'neutral ground' and its relation to disencumbered experience. In this sketch Hawthorne writes of an hour of the night when one wakes suddenly into a world of scattered dreams. It is a time out of time when yesterday has vanished and tomorrow has not yet emerged, 'an intermediate space where the business of life does not intrude.' The sketch epitomizes such familiar features of Hawthorne's fiction as inner guilt and the comforting associations of the hearth. Its larger significance, however, lies in its brooding dramatization of the conditions of his fiction. Hawthorne's subject is the haunted mind, but the setting of the sketch is a kind of neutral ground — out of time, between yesterday and tomorrow. Somewhere behind or below is the haunted mind (Hawthorne's metaphor for the free-floating imagination), which yields up vivid and uncontrolled images never yet encumbered or engaged by social institutions. As they emerge onto the neutral ground (here, the 'intermediate space'), they confront actually existing things (furniture in the room, embers on the hearth) that swim into cognition: and the meeting of the two provides the potential for art.
To juxtapose the mental drama of 'The Haunted Mind' with a different set of instructions for confronting the terrors of the night gives us a surer view of the context in which Hawthorne lived and wrote. James Beattie was a Scottish moral philosopher, one of the Common Sense school that had widespread significance on American educators, clerics, and writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. In his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), Beattie describes what he considers the most preferable way of dealing with 'imaginary terrors' of the night. 'By the glimmering of the moon,' he writes, 'I have once and again beheld at midnight, the exact form of a man or woman, sitting silent and motionless by my bedside. Had I hid my head, without daring to look the apparition in the face, I should have passed the night in horror, and risen in the morning with the persuasion of having seen a ghost.' But determined to discover 'the truth, I discovered that it was nothing more than the accidental disposition of my clothes upon a chair.' On another occasion Beattie was alarmed to see 'by the faint light of the dawn, a coffin laid out between my bed and the window…. I set myself to examine it, and -76- found it was only a stream of yellowish light, falling in a particular manner upon the floor, from between the window-curtains.'
Here we have two ways of treating the imagination at its most exacerbated. James Beattie has no place for the haunted mind: he moves rationally to discover the facts of perception so that the actual world — what he would call the world of truth — is reestablished around him. In 'The Haunted Mind,' however, Hawthorne's narrator sustains a series of images within the mind. Retreating (head under the covers) from the wintry world outside, he speculates on the luxury of living forever like an oyster in a shell, then envisions the dead lying in their 'narrow coffins.' After entertaining such 'hideous' fantasies, the narrator finally welcomes the sight of embers on the hearth because it balances the terrors of the haunted mind. What Beattie would banish as a matter of course (in the name of common sense), Hawthorne nourishes 'on the borders of sleep and wakefulness' (in the name of imaginative life).
In the terms established by Hawthorne in 'The Haunted Mind,' failure to achieve the necessary balance of the imaginary and the actual may come about in one of two ways. In an overpowering wakefulness, in the midst of the insistence on empirical fact that James Beattie espouses, the products of the haunted mind are subjected to skeptical attack, rationalized, as it were, out of existence, rendered powerless. Conversely, blocked away from actually existing things and left to itself, the haunted mind could only contemplate
