Romancing the Center

In Custom-House, the well-known preface to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne calls moonlight the romance-writer's most congenial medium, for moonlight turns the floor of an ordinary sitting room, crowded by day but deserted by night, into neutral territory, something 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. For over a quarter of a century, critics of American literature have been wearing a path through the neutral territory of romance, scrutinizing the child's shoe and the doll in her wicker carriage, experimentally rocking the hobby horse, and shifting the chairs around to develop a theory and tradition of American fiction grounded in Hawthorne's neutral territory. Thanks to the literary criticism written after World War II, when American literature first gained a respectable footing in the academy, the idea that the characteristically American literary form was the romance, rather than the novel, has become a critical commonplace of American Studies. Richard Chase, influenced by his older friend and colleague Lionel Trilling, presented the classic statement of this argument in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957). Where European writers depicted the pressure of a social world upon the individual, said Chase, American writers explored the individual consciousness estranged from society; where European fiction was committed to ref

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