THE SCARLET LETTER AS A ROMANCE 1.In combining realistic and imaginative elements to tell a moving and dreamlike story,The Scarlet Letteris an example of the romance genre. In fact, the novel’s original title wasThe Scarlet Letter: A Romance.While today we think of romances as love stories, andThe Scarlet Letterdoes contain love scenes between its two protagonists, the term romance as Hawthorne uses it refers to a work of fiction that does not adhere strictly to reality. In the preface of the book, Hawthorne defines romance as taking place “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.”The Scarlet Lettermixes the actual in the form of a historically accurate setting, believable characters, and realistic dialogue with elements of the imaginary, such as the giant “A” that lights up the night sky and the strange mark burned into Dimmesdale's chest. These otherworldly effects heighten the sense of drama in the story, and convey the feeling that while the exact story is probably not true, it conveys a deeper emotional truth that surpasses the specifics of the tale. The Scarlet Letteralso qualifies as a romance in that it incorporates fantastic elements while remaining emotionally and psychologically realistic. Hawthorne wrote in the preface of another of his romances,The House of the Seven Gables, that a romance “sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart.” InThe Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne underscores the emotional veracity of his tale by qualifying the fantastical elements as possibly the result of the characters’ heightened emotional states. For example, when the A appears in the sky, he leaves open the possibility it is an optical illusion caused by Dimmesdale’s guilty conscience: “We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart that the minister… beheld there the appearance of an immense letter.” Similarly, Hawthorne suggests some witnesses claimed there was no mark on Dimmesdale’s chest when he died on the
