Each of Hawthorne's major romances contains a preface explaining that his kind of fiction requires a domain of its own if it is to flourish. In "The Custom-House" sketch, which serves as an introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne formulates the metaphor of "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other." In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, as we have seen, he explains that the latitude of fashion and material afforded by the romance is congenial to his imagination. His concern in The Blithedale Romance (1852) is "to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel," where his characters will not be exposed to direct comparison "with the actual events of real lives." The difficulty of creating fiction without access to a "Faery Land," he admits, "has always pressed heavily" upon him. The same perspective evokes his statement concerning the romance and America in the preface to The Marble Faun (1860). Italy, he explains, afforded him "a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America." -75-
As much as any of his prefatory statements, Hawthorne's sketch "The Haunted Mind" (1835) suggests the nature of the "neutral ground" and its relation to disencumbered experience. In this sketch Hawthorne writes of an hour of the night when one wakes suddenly into a world of scattered dreams. It is a time out of time when yesterday has vanished and tomorrow has not yet emerged, "an intermediate space where the business of life does not intrude." The sketch epitomizes such familiar features of Hawthorne's fiction as inner guilt and the comforting associations of the hearth. Its larger significance, however, lies in its brooding dramatization of the conditions of his fiction. Hawthorne's subject is the haunted mind, but the setting of the sketch is a kind of neutral ground — out of time, between yesterday and tomorrow. Somewhere behind or below is the haunted mind (Hawthorne's metaphor for the free-floating imagination), which yields up vivid and uncontrolled images never yet encumbered or engaged by social institutions. As they emerge onto the neutral ground (here, the "intermediate space"), they confront actually existing things (furniture in the room, embers on the hearth) that swim into cognition: and the meeting of the two provides the potential for art.
To juxtapose the mental drama of "The Haunted Mind" with a different set of instructions for confronting the terrors of the night gives us a surer view of the context in which Hawthorne lived and wrote. James Beattie was a Scottish moral philosopher, one of the Common Sense school that had widespread significance on American educators, clerics, and writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. In his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), Beattie describes what he considers the most preferable way of dealing with "imaginary terrors" of the night. "By the glimmering of the moon," he writes, "I have once and again beheld at midnight, the exact form of a man or woman, sitting silent and motionless by my bedside. Had I hid my head, without daring to look the apparition in the face, I should have passed the night in horror, and risen in the morning with the persuasion of having seen a ghost." But determined to discover "the truth, I discovered that it was nothing more than the accidental disposition of my clothes upon a chair." On another occasion Beattie was alarmed to see "by the faint light of the dawn, a coffin laid out between my bed and the window…. I set myself to examine it, and -76- found it was only a stream of yellowish light, falling in a particular manner upon the floor, from between the window-curtains."
Here we have two ways of treating the imagination at its most exacerbated. James Beattie has no place for the haunted mind: he moves rationally to discover the facts of perception so that the actual world — what he would call the world of truth — is reestablished around him. In "The Haunted Mind," however, Hawthorne's narrator sustains a series of images within the mind. Retreating (head under the covers) from the wintry world outside, he speculates on the luxury of living forever like an oyster in a shell, then envisions the dead lying in their "narrow coffins." After entertaining such "hideous" fantasies, the narrator finally welcomes the sight of embers on the hearth because it balances the terrors of the haunted mind. What Beattie would banish as a matter of course (in the name of common sense), Hawthorne nourishes "on the borders of sleep and wakefulness" (in the name of imaginative life).
In the terms established by Hawthorne in "The Haunted Mind," failure to achieve the necessary balance of the imaginary and the actual may come about in one of two ways. In an overpowering wakefulness, in the midst of the insistence on empirical fact that James Beattie espouses, the products of the haunted mind are subjected to skeptical attack, rationalized, as it were, out of existence, rendered powerless. Conversely, blocked away from actually existing things and left to itself, the haunted mind could only contemplate its own nightmare visions in an empty and narcissistic exercise. The lurking danger — in this sketch, in Hawthorne's tales and romances, and in his meditations on art and life — is that the imaginative and the actual worlds might somehow be cut off from each other, leaving each in an impoverished and untenable position. When, in the final year of his life, he lamented that "The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me," Hawthorne signaled in the coded language he had long employed his awareness of the death of his imagination.
Poe's attitude toward the imagination and thus toward his fiction contrasts sharply with that of Hawthorne. Whereas Hawthorne labors toward the latitude he sees necessary for the romance, Poe leaps boldly into what the narrator of "Berenice" (1835) calls "palace[s] of -77- imagination" and thumbs his nose at the hot, hard practical life of America. Whereas Hawthorne focuses on the consequences of human action with painstaking emphasis, Poe (as we shall see) ignores consequences, at times with sportive insistence. He champions the imagination, proclaims its range as unlimited, and sets it free to play in a realm of its own where it is lord of all it surveys. In his "Marginalia" (1846) Poe describes certain fancies that come to one on the "borderground" between sleep and wakefulness. His version of a middle ground, unlike Hawthorne's, is not a place where the actual and the imaginary may meet in productive combination; the fancies of which he speaks inspire ecstasy beyond the range of human experience; they reveal "a glimpse of the spirit's outer world." Poe's "border-ground," in other words, is a point from which the imagination, unbounded and free from constraint, may journey into the "supernal."