Exposing the Verisimilar: Hawthorne's "Wakefield" and "Feathertop"

TLDR: In this article, the narrators of these tales draw authority from conventions of moralized prose and romance that allow as probable what we do not expect within our everyday experience nor, by extension, in novelistic modes of fiction.

Abstract: akefield\" (1835) and \"Feathertop\" (1852) are improbable tales that nevertheless engage our belief in their own peculiar veracity. The narrators of these tales draw authority from conventions of moralized prose and romance that allow as probable what we do not expect within our everyday experience nor, by extension, in novelistic modes of fiction. We tentatively accept the narrator's claim in the earlier tale that a meaningful character will emerge from his announced imaginative activity because explicit fictionalizing is a familiar convention of romance and because explicit narrative judgment is a familiar convention of moralized prose. Likewise, we tentatively accept the narrator's claim in the last of Hawthorne's short fictions that inhaling a magical pipe brings a scarecrow to life, and that this show of life speaks to our own, because we grant to certain kinds of fiction latitude for such unnatural events. But these narrators also call into question the authority of their claims for the truths of moralized prose and romance as well as the authority of our own perceptions and