Name: ____________________________________ Date: __________ Per: ____
AP III American Literature
The Scarlet Letter is a Romance.
Just go back to the title page...
1. What does this mean? Thoughts on the definition of “romance”
2. Here is a selection of literary criticism regarding Romance and the romantic novel.
There will be 4 sources in all (A,B,C,D)
There are TWO steps here as you read ALL FOUR:
1. Circle the key words.
2. Make notes and annotate.
A. from CH Holman, Handbook of Literature: "Romance is now frequently used as a term to
designate a kind of fiction that differs from the novel in being more freely the product of the
author's imagination than the product of an effort to represent the actual world with
verisimilitude."
3. Define verisimilitude:
B. From Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957; Johns Hopkins, 1980)
Romance[. . . ] [T]he word must signify, besides the more obvious qualities of the picturesque
and the heroic, an assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude,
development, and continuity; a tendency towards melodrama and idyl; a more or less formal
abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency to plunge into the underside of consciousness; a
willingness to abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man in society, or to
consider these things only indirectly or abstractly (ix).
Doubtless the main difference between the novel and the romance is in the way in which they
view reality. The novel renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a group of
people and set them going about the business of life. We come to see these people in their real
complexity of temperament and motive. They are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to
their social class, to their own past. Character is more important than action and plot, and
probably the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary purpose of enhancing
our knowledge of and feeling for an important character, a group of characters, or a way of life.
The events that occur will usually be plausible, given the circumstances, and if the novelist
includes a violent or sensational occurrence in his plot, he will introduce it only into such scenes
as have been (in the words of Percy Lubbock) "already prepared to vouch for it." Historically, as
it has often been said, the novel has served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle
class (12).
By contrast the romance, following distantly the medieval example, feels free to render reality in
less volume and detail. It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a romance
than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality. (This is not always true, as
we see in what might be called the static romances of Hawthorne, in which the author uses the
allegorical and moral, rather than the dramatic, possibilities of the form.) The romance can
flourish without providing much intricacy of relation. The characters, probably rather twodimensional types, will not be complexly related to each other or to society or to the past. Human
beings will on the whole be shown in an ideal relation--that is, they will share emotions only after
these have become abstract or symbolic. To be sure, characters may become profoundly involved
in some way, as in Hawthorne or Melville, but it will be a deep and narrow, an obsessive,
involvement. In American romances it will not matter much what class people come from, and
where the novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the romancer
will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery. Character itself becomes, then, somewhat
abstract and ideal, so much so in some romances that it seems to be merely a function of plot. The
plot we may expect to be highly colored. Astonishing events may occur, and these are likely to
have a symbolic or ideological, rather than a realistic, plausibility. Being less committed to the
immediate rendition of reality than the novel, the romance will more freely veer toward mythic,
allegorical, and symbolistic forms. --Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (13)
C. William Gilmore Simms
The Romance is of loftier origin than the Novel. It approximates the poem. It may be described as
an amalgam of the two. . . . The standards of the Romance . . . are very much those of the epic. It
invests individuals with an absorbing interest--it hurries them rapidly through crowding and
exacting events, in a narrow space of time--it requires the same unities of plan, of purpose, and
harmony of parts, and it seeks for its adventures among the wild and wonderful. It does not
confine itself to what is known, or even what is probable. It grasps at the possible; and placing a
human agent in hitherto untried situations, it exercises its ingenuity in extricating him from them,
while describing his feelings and his fortunes in the process.(From William Gilmore Simms's
prefatory letter to The Yemassee, quoted in Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition, p. 16)
4. Now write a brief definition of “A Romance” with a list of at least 3 conventions of
romance here: (Synthesize what you have just read)
4. Find Hawthorne’s discussion of Romance in The Custom House. (source D) It begins like
this:
. “...If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless
case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showcasing all its
figures so distinctly, -- making every object so minute visible, yet so unlike a morning or
noontide visibility....”
Reread. Explain his thoughts on “romance” and “novel”
5. Read the following excerpt of literary criticism about Hawthorne.
E. Unable to feel any confidence in the reality of the subjective, and unable, despite the long
effort of his notebooks, to come to terms with the solid earth, Hawthorne evolved his conception
of the 'romance.' Whereas the novelist was limited to "the probably and ordinary course of man's
experience," the romancer tried to create a realm midway between private thought and the
objective world. This doctrine, which is the burden of the prefaces to The House of Seven Gables,
The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, betrayed an intellectual as well as a literary
problem. Hawthorne was anxious not merely to draw the literary distinction between the novel
and the romance, and to enter apologies for the latter, but also, and more fundamentally, to fix the
status of the romance in an almost metaphysical sense. While he was granting or even insisting
that 'reality' belonged to [Anthony] Trollope, he was trying, in effect, to say what kind of reality
his own work had."
--Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature
6. Go back and mark it up.
7. Explain….
8. Mark up his definition below:
Hawthorne's Definition of Romance (from "The Custom House", in The Scarlet
Letter)
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a
hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and
showcasing all its figures so distinctly, -- making every object so minute visible, yet so
unlike a morning or noontide visibility, -- is a medium the most suitable for a romancewriter to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of
the well-known apartment; the chairs with each its separate individuality; the centretable, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa;
the picture on the wall,--all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the
unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of the
intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity
thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse,-whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with
a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by
daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory,
somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and Imaginary may
meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here,
without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite
surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now
sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us
doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
The big question: What kind of “reality” does the Scarlet Letter
have? Use your sources and your reading!
1.
2.
3.
Find a passage in TSL to support your claim.
Write it out and annotate it in terms of your claim
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