호손의 글쓰기 전략: ‘머리말’에 나타난로맨스론을 중심으로

Abstract

In a series of prefaces, Nathaniel Hawthorne tries to offer a particular conception of ‘romance’ by which he would put the reader into “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land.” Hawthorne finds that neutral ground in the distant past. The seventeenth-century Boston he chooses to write about is a community that recognizes no clear line between “the Actual and the Imaginary.” For Hawthorne, the pastness of the past, because of its sheer force of temporal and spatial distance, could become a rich, imaginative breeding ground for his theory of romance. In “The Custom-House,” a long prefatory essay to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne begins to formulate his famous theory of romance. In the first place, he assumes a basic division of reality upon which literature should be based into the actual, on the one hand, and the imaginary, on the other. He suggests that life seen in the sunlight is the stuff of the novel, while the familiar seen in the moonlight and warmed slightly by the firelight is the stuff of the romance. Hawthorne believes that romance, unlike the novel, does not have to restrict itself to the probable. In the prefaces to other major romances, Hawthorne also tends primarily to distinguish between the novel and romance. In the brief preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne claims the latitude of the romancer without adhering to the “minute fidelity” required by the novel. It is the freedom in order to treat how history lives on into the present. With The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun Hawthorne seeks to write fiction based explicitly on his personal experience. His months at Brook Farm provide the setting of the former tale, much as the family’s stay in Italy is worked into the latter. In the prefaces of both romances, Hawthorne suggests his experimentation with artifice going on among modern, anti-realist writers. It is the faculty of imagination which transmutes the raw material of reality into the finished product of art. Finally, the prefaces to Hawthorne’s major works are designed to establish this imaginative locale. So long as the romance is true to what is called the truth of the human heart, it has every right to mingle the marvelous and the actual. While the novelist who, like the historian tied down to the requirements of a rigid adherence to facts, presents only the particular, the romancer who, like the poet, can modify facts and fashion them into meaningful patterns, is able to present the universal.