Hawthorne is chiefly remembered as the creative genius who sought to define the romance. He contributed four major romances to the world’s literature: The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, and The Scarlet Letter. In each of these he sought, in the prefaces, to define what romance meant to him. In the Custom House preface of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne discusses part of his concept or definition of the romance novel. He explains that life seen through moonlight is the subject of the novel. If the writer is sitting in a room in the moonlight and looks around at the familiar items on the floor — a wicker carriage or a hobby horse, for example — he can discern a quality of “strangeness and remoteness” in these familiar objects. And so he has found a territory in which the familiar becomes enchanted and “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.” Hawthorne believes that ". . . at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all lone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”
Finally, The Scarlet Letter is a psychological romance. Hawthorne proposes to study the effects of sin on the lives of his characters. Far ahead of his time, he delves into human alienation and what it does to the soul. Doubt and self-torture provide psychological shadows in the character of Dimmesdale. Rebellion and defiance in the face of repressive laws can be seen in his heroine, Hester Prynne. She may be forced to wear the scarlet letter, but she mocks that sentence with her elaborate embroidery. The Puritan concern with man’s depravity and its effect on individual characters is intertwined throughout the plot. What happens when a person has an excess of passion or intellect? When a balance of the two is not achieved in an individual, what is the end result? Within the framework of the romance, Hawthorne lays out his evidence of the psychological conflicts within and around his characters.
