Nathaniel Hawthorne and Romance

호손은 자신의 소설 The Scarlet Letter에 Romance라는 부제를 부쳤다. 원래 Romance라는 용어는 중세의 기사 이야기를 일컫는 데에서 시작되었으나, 산문 이야기로서의 로맨스 장르는 대체로 초자연적인 현상을 포함하고 있는 것이 특징이다. 호손의 이 작품에도 다소 불가사의한 요소들이 등장하지만 호손이 이 용어를 사용한 것은 그러한 요소들을 통해 '미국의 역사적 현실'을 제대로 담아보려 했기 때문이라고 할 수 있다.

[The Custom House]와 연결해서 이야기한다면 (아랫부분에서 굵은 활자로 된 부분에 특히 주목할 것)

로맨스라는 장르를 통해 현실과 상상의 세계가 만나는 중간 지대의 창조를 함으로써, 우리 삶의 진실을 좀 더 잘 포착하려는 시도.

Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility--is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer 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 centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall--all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of 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 the 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.