“In Hawthorne, light needs to be modified, or, as the case may be, accentuated, by shadow; heat, tempered with coolness; reality, relieved by a Something Else that will vary according to the reality opposed.” (4)
- Richard Harter Fogle Hawthorne’s Imagery: The “Proper Light and Shadow” in the Major Romances (1969)
Right from the beginning, in the opening chapter – titled “The Prefaces and Other Criticism” – I became aware of myself in relation to this text, remembering my initial excited reactions to it back in the early ‘80s’. The first thing that caught my attention was a quote from the “Old Manse” essay in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) in which Hawthorne mentioned “fairyland,” describing it as a place where time passes strangely, where “three years hastened away a noiseless flight, as the breezy sunshine chases away the cloud shadows across the depths of a still valley.” This theme is very well-known to me, now, from a variety of sources, including Celtic myth and Neo-Paganism. Wonderful to realize that Hawthorne was someone who referred to faery lore and adapted a version of it to his stories and novels! Could reading Hawthorne have been one of the first places I came across this theme in a non-mythic literature?
The next thing that caught my attention was Fogle suggesting a relationship for Hawthorne between transience and harmony. I sensed this in many of the author’s narrative scenarios and symbolic signifiers, in his short stories as well as in the novels, back when I was reading him. What is in harmony in a scene or scenario is often also in transition; it is passing, even as it is experienced—perhaps tending toward a new harmony. Fogle says:
“Hawthorne frequently reaches out toward synthesis and totality, but the gesture is always tentative. He never commits himself to a single image, a single mood. There is in him the sense of a consummate whole, but one ideally attainable, never to be realized concretely.” (4)
Synthesis involves bringing elements together in an harmonious way. Totality, however – the seeing of the ‘whole picture’ – is beyond his (and our) comprehension as finite mortal beings. I sense in the use of these terms an allowance for and recognition of the presence of Mystery in our lives; an awareness of the complexities of the reality in which we dwell and quest for meaning, while at the same time allowing for the incompleatness of our expression of it. Fogle says further, elucidating on this point, that:
“Fullness is perhaps conceivable as a moving panorama, or even as a globe that can be turned before one on its axis; but it can be only perceived in the aspects immediately presented, not grasped as a unity.” (4)
We cannot encompass or even comprehend the whole of reality; except via the parts to which we are exposed and have access. This is not an argument for provincialism; but rather an offer of perspective allowing for the limits of human perception, intelligence and understanding—while still affirming these abilities as valuable components of our being-in-becoming.
Fogle then discusses Hawthorne’s work-experiences, in particular his time at the Salem Custom House; the essay dealing with it being the introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne there affirms that all of his life- and work-experiences were preparatory; that he accepted them with gratitude for the role of Providence in his life. For almost-40 years of my life I was cast into various experiences and did a variety of work; all of which I did intuit as preparatory_ for what? My vocation as a Poet-Writer; of which I first came to the thresholds of realization through an epiphany I had after my first retreat at a Trappist monastery in the summer of 1989.
Hawthorne says that while working at the Custom House, he felt that “A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me.” I cannot say exactly the same; as all the while I was seeking academic positions and doing odd jobs, I was striving toward self-realization as a Poet. Not even at my present place of employment – where I’ve been now for 17 years – do I feel that my “gift” and “faculty” has been suspended, much less inanimate in me. Working where I have all these years has allowed me to support myself and bring a couple hundred blogs, five published books and four more still in manuscript – to fruition. I do understand what Hawthorne is saying, however, and sympathize. I then more fully embrace what Hawthorne says next of his preparatory time:
“I never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that, within no long period, and wherever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, a change would come.”[1]
I, too, long-experienced an anticipatory sense of directioning in my life. An intuition of what I was seeking, though unable to put words to it and embrace it until after that ‘moment’ in 1989.
Next, Fogle discusses something that has become foundational to me: The role of the Moon and moonlight in poetics, aesthetics and Creative Imaginings! Fogle says that for Hawthorne, “the most comprehensive image of artistic creation, or the most favorable condition for artistic creation, was illuminated by moonlight and firelight.” (5) I read this in my mid-20’s and it soon became a rune of the nature of creativity and the influence of the Moon, for me, on my way, at that time and over the decades since, journeying with and into an understanding of – and communion with – the ‘Muse.’ (See my blog “A Musing Life” [2 February 2018] for a narrative of my poetic and spiritual journey into communion with the Muse.)
Hereinafter comes the long text on the effects of Moonlight on the familiar world in which we inhabit in the daylight hours. _An inspiring text that I wrote-out several times in different notebooks, and later typed-out in the late-1980’s, having kept it in my Preliminarian ever since. _And if I do not rein-in my enthusiasm, I may copy out the next few paragraphs from Fogle’s book here in full! I cited it back in the Spring, in a blog (“Hawthorne’s Other Bench” [6 January 2025]) posted at this site. So let me start by quoting what Fogle says about it, instead:
“Moonlight was for Hawthorne peculiarly the light of Imagination, though seldom sufficient in itself. The distinctness of the figures of the carpet also had a special significance, for distinctness was to him an attribute of reality, the vision of which was very precious to him, very hard to gain, and tragically easy to lose. The clarity of outline was in partial opposition to the illusiveness that moonlight and imagination implied.” (6)
Hawthorne here touches on something that every creative or thoughtful person has probably had to face; the nature of reality—at one time or another. What is this world, this existence—in which we find ourselves? Or in Martin Heidegger’s poetic phrasing; ‘this world’ into which we have found ourselves ‘thrown?’ Reality is not really like a ball or globe that we can simply turn and look at and comprehend in full from our finite vantage point. Reality is vast and deep, and it requires a lifetime – at least – to even achieve a moderate comprehension of it. Yet we strive and seek and quest for understanding, and do come to a certain grasp of it; enough – perhaps sometimes more – to be able to navigate through this brief life adroitly. What I now see, from my current vantage point, is that Hawthorne formulated in this introduction to The Scarlet Letter is a praxis (theory & practice combined) for understanding, grappling with and expressing reality.
Just before this, Hawthorne is lamenting that his imagination was often a clouded mirror when at the Custom House, and that, if it did not even clear in the late hours of night, when the room was illuminated by Moonlight and Firelight, so much the worse. I’ve known that experience. Most creative people have probably experienced something like this at one time or another? The circumstances for creativity are right, the time is available; but nothing comes of it. I once wrote a poem about this called “A Poetics of the Creative Process”[2] in which I struggled with the inevitable failures and disappointments, and in some cases the final success, of the creative process. As a response to his own dilemma, Hawthorne then pleads for the richness and aptness of Moonlight and Firelight to his ‘subject,’ saying (yes, _I’m apparently going to quote the whole text here, again…):
“If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests.”
[Here is the “carpet” Hawthorne referred to in the quote from Fogle.]
Looking at a room, a forest glade, or any other locale in moonlight, one experiences a distancing from ‘everyday reality’ and perhaps – if we are fortunate; the Muse smiling upon us – the resonance of “Another World.” That is, a ‘fictive,’ imagined, imaginary world; the realm of faërie—as I have more recently learned to call it through my reading of Tolkien! Is this the first place I read it so plainly stated; in the words of a literary author with whom I immediately felt a sympathy, having discovered – as I did with Wordsworth about the same time in my life – a kindred spirit?!
The distinctness of objects – all too familiar in the light of day – is wrought in a different way in the light of the Moon or, as Hawthorne will point out, that of a fireplace. It is a strange distinctness. You know what the object in your sense-field is, at least most of the time, but in Moonlight it presences differently than it will in the sun’s light. I love watching Moonlight sweeping across a scene, whether indoors or outside_ in town or in the woods, feeling the transmutation of the familiar under its effect, and then the threat of the unusual or strange emerging from it – that possibility often stemming from the apprehension of something that should be familiar, yet is not! “What is that?” _or more chillingly, “What is that?”
I have oft sat in a darkening room with a window opening toward the east, where the Moon rises; feeling inspired to stay and watch the coming of the moonbeams into the room—now touching the floor for the first time, and then illuminating the first object as rays move in retrograde within the room to the rising of the Moon in the sky. Here I whole-heartedly relate to the kind of experience that Hawthorne describes next; the transmutation of the ordinary into ‘Something Else:”
“There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work basket, a volume or two, and an extinguishing lamp; the sofa, the bookcase; the picture on the wall,—all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect.”
The unusual emerges out of the usual, the strange out of the familiar; the extraordinary out of the ordinary—and so, if you are not open to and immersed in the ordinary, you may not notice or fully experience the extraordinary. Hawthorne says:
“Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse—whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight.”
The moonlit world has a ‘dignity’ all its own; not ‘better’ than daylight actuality—just different, and which is conducive to Imaginings and Creativity. This is a primary touchstone of a Romanticist paradigm!
Hawthorne then introduces a dyadic construct; that between Actuality and the Imaginary—wherein I find a tap-root of my propensity to refer to all ‘reality’ as “real,” whether it is part of the natural and social worlds in which we dwell – Earth & Cosmos – or whether a poem, painting, story, or anything else imaginatively created or ‘visited’ in dreams, perhaps under the spell of faërie. Hawthorne says:
“Thus, therefore, 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.”
There is the Actual World, and then there is the Realm opened up by the Imagination. These two come into concert with one another – in the neutral territory of our proximately experienced world; wherever that may be; wherever we are – allowing us to express our inspirations, dreams and visitations—telling the stories born out of this confluence; i.e., this ‘neutral’ place. Here is a basic ontological distinction constituting a Romanticist way of experiencing the world. It is in the meeting and mingling of the Actual and the Imaginary that Inspiration takes hold; at least for the Romantic Poet, Writer, Musician or Artist. Within this confluence; at this “neutral territory,” Hawthorne says:
“Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.”
Seeing a ghost might be considered ‘natural’ in either moonlight or, as Hawthorne also intimates here, fireshine. The Imaginary is connected with fairy-land, and so the travelling back and forth between worlds – That one and This one – becomes something at least potentially non-frightening; because—we are in the neutral space where Actuality and the Imaginary confluence with one another. I would agree, and say so, except perhaps when an apparition is come for retribution or recompense—as in many stories and folkloric tales!?
Moonlight and Firelight are thus complementary in their relation to Actuality and the Imaginary! Often, when out camping or sitting near a campfire at a friend’s house, I have experienced this subtle transformation of the environs all-around in the aura of firelight to which Hawthorne here refers! He says, describing a coal – rather than wood – fire:
“The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women.”
Moonlight and Firelight can co-mingle in the illumination of the ordinary world. Firelight is associated with warmth, as Moonlight is associated with chill and coldness. Out of their confluence arises a space for human sensibilities. “Snow-images” is here a term Hawthorne uses to describe the coldness of Moon-lit scenes.
Reading this brings back memories of sitting by a fireplace and watching the dance of light and shadows upon all the surfaces in the room. The dance of light and shadows! I can see them now! It is this experience that drew me into writing Yule stories about a family that came to be called “The Whittiers;” those stories oft being explorations of Life-Together in Earth & Sprit under the dyadic theme of “Heart & Hearth.” As I imagine sitting in the main room of the Whittier House, gazing into the large fireplace, I look up and_ I see images dancing in the large mirror over the mantel! Hawthorne then takes us further_ into that Looking-Glass! He says:
“Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative.”
I have often imagined mirrors as portals into otherworlds. (Have you?) Hawthorne connects the looking-glass with the impetus toward “romance,” or – I would also call it – “mystical” creativity:
“Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”
I might say “bring out the truth” of the scene, instead of making it “seem” like truth. But that may be too strong. Yet, that allowed, the mirror stands for an “imitation” of the blended Actual and Imaginary, and is therefore a rune of the Work of Art conceived and perhaps executed in – or at least in the memory of – the blended world that is reflected in the mirror.
As I have often felt and understood – intuited and tried to express – the Actual is too heavy a burden, as Hawthorne sees as well, for the actuation of Art. It needs the infusion of the Imaginary. Without that, a work of art simply reproduces the natural and social worlds in which we find ourselves. It re-presents the ‘what-is’ without having that poetic distancing from it that the confluence of the Imaginary with the Actual provides.
I must now say that I affirm “Realist” and “Naturalistic” story-telling, and have read many novels and stories told from that perspective. If what you want is a representation of ‘the way things are,’ then creating within the Actual only and bringing forth works of Art that show it forth – but may also reify it – is a worthwhile praxis. “Realist” or “Naturalistic” Art also uses the Imagination; but it is not, perhaps, utilizing “the Imaginary” in the same sense in which Hawthorne uses that term. Not in a Romanticist sense.
We need to grapple-with and try and understand the Actual in order to live-life, at the very least to survive – but to really live-life-to-the-fullest, I believe, we may need the Something More that the Imaginary grants to us when infusing and mixing with the Actual in that ‘neutral’ space. The Imaginary on its own is perhaps just as much a burden as is the Actual without the Imaginary. You may end up living in a partial-fantasy; for true Fantasy will mirror and allude to the Actual without simply replicating it. Our focus on ‘Realism,’ so-called, is valuable. But without the Imaginary to infuse and transmute it, it may be more difficult to see past the what-is to the what-might-be, much less enable us to delve below the surface of the what-is in order to better understand it’s girth and heft. Our hopes for a better or even just different world are often the fruit of the Imaginary acting upon the Actual, and vice versa. Whether in a Realist or a Romanticist paradigm, how else could we envision new possibilities except by imagining them?
At this point, Fogle turns to the “Main Street” story in The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales that I analyzed at length in “Hawthorne’s Other Bench,” and then goes on to discuss the prefaces to the major works in terms of the use of Light and Shadow in those texts. Each of the major novels deals with the interplay of the Actual and the Imaginary. I have only dealt here with about four pages from the Preface, and hope this whets your interest, as Fogle’s analysis is worth reading.
I hope to re-read Hawthorne’s novels someday. Hawthorne is one of the great, original novelists in the early American Tradition. I had forgotten how Gothic his work was and how deeply Romanticist he was in his praxis. I am glad to have re-discovered Fogle’s excellent book, and Hawthorne through it!
Finis
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