In his introduction to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne asserts that Blithedale, despite an obvious resemblance to Brook Farm, is merely a convenient site ("a theatre") for his phantasmagorical imaginings -- in short, he asks the reader to accept that he has written a Romance, a form about which he rhapsodizes, "a certain conventional privilege seems to be awarded to the romancer; his work is not put exactly side by side with nature" (38). The Romance grants the author a certain leeway for melodrama and emotionality. In his preface to The House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne writes:
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's existence. The former... has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation.1
This claim may not seem so remarkable, except when compared with Hawthorne's cultural climate and literary peers. True, authors like Fuller and Emerson wax poetic often enough, but typically in service to a spiritual endeavor -- which maintains the vitality and rigor which we have associated with the formation of American identity. By comparison, Romance is gothic, shadowy; it focuses on individual emotion rather than the state of Man.
This kind of voice seems far out of line from the one Hawthorne uses to praise Thoreau as a man who has a "deep and true taste for poetry" but is "literal in observation" on a "basis of good sense and of moral truth."2 Thoreau is allied with nature -- "[he] managed the boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it" (AN) -- not at all a part of a fairy realm where enchantment is paramount over the laws of nature. Compare the following bits of robust, masculine Americana from our other authors:
In American Sublime, Rob Wilson suggests that the relationship between the robust individual (man) and the American landscape is as artificial as the "atmosphere of strange enchantment" which Hawthorne self-consciously constructs. Wilson claims that "[s]ublimity accrues through the private production of an abyss ('vacant space') or delusion of textual displacement ('empty spirit') out of which selfhood can emerge to inarguable claims...tied, as if a cultural given, to the project of self-reliance" (9). He goes on to say:
The...experience of huge natural forces may dwarf and empty the self, but it no less underwrites the ongoing appropriation of nature-writ-large within a giddying sense of self-empowermet...yet the same experience of tremendousness underwrites strange state of self-dispossession and affirms sheer uselessness. (13)
In other words, the aggrandizement of the (admittedly pretty impressive) American landscape, and the place of the independent American spirit in it, are particular and purposeful tropes of art and literature of the time. The Romance and the cult of vigor may not be so far apart after all.