RELUCTANT ROMANCERS: SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND DEROGATION IN PROSE ROMANCE M IC H A E L T A Y L O R University of New Brunswick I n the last chapter of his book The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks lists those authors whom he considers to be inspired by a melodramatic vision of reality — among others, Hugo, Balzac, James, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Against these, Brooks lines up an opposing group of writers led by Flaubert, Maupassant, and Beckett. This second group, Brooks argues, “[sets] against the ambitions of melodramatism an attitude of deconstructive and stoic ma terialism, and a language of deflationary suspicion” (198). Although Brooks understandably wishes to keep the lines of demarcation between his two groups unsmudged, his resonant phrasing of the techniques of the defla tors of melodrama also describes the stance and language of many of the practitioners of another exercise of the melodramatic imagination, the prose romance. Throughout most of its history, the prose romance, whose main aim has been to arouse the “single, uncritical, and primitive response of won der” (Hamilton 297), has itself aroused in its own authors an extraordinary self-consciousness about their culpability in being so atavistically-minded. This is especially the case at those junctures in literary and social history when, for whatever reason, the prose romance has exerted a fatal attraction for the serious writers of the time. How some of them manifest and deal with this culpability is the subject of this paper, but first I would like to establish the pervasiveness of their sense of guilt, its trans-historical immanence, its sometimes shattering intensity. We might consider, to begin with, the efflorescence of these feelings of guilt in nineteenth-century America during a period when the writing of prose romance carried the day for serious authors. Cooper, Melville, and Hawthorne chose to write romances (rather than novels) principally to com pete for a public enamoured of such low-brow romances as Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wicked World (1850) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). On February 11, 1860, the celebrated ro mancer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to James T. Fields with regard to The Marble Faun, “My own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those I myself am able to write. If I were to meet with such books as mine, by another writer, I don’t believe I should be able to get through them” (Perkins 68). Hawthorne’s revulsion from his own work transcends the English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v ii, l, March 1991 normal bounds of authorial self-criticism, but his is not the uniquely patho logical voice. Michael Davitt Bell reminds us that during this whole period in American literature when prose romance was the dominant form, its fa mous romance writers displayed an unseemly defensiveness: “Brown, Irving, and Hawthorne often painfully denigrated not only the order of imaginative experience but their own status as writers of fiction” (29). Bell argues that by embracing their role as romancers they were embracing what sociologists call (and what they themselves implicitly understood as) a “deviant career” (30)What is surprising, however, is not the fact that these writers feel ambiva lent about their vocation, but rather that they feel their literary guilt with such burning intensity. Feelings of ambivalence, after all, are commonplace. Even Sidney, the most poised and secure of sixteenth-century romance writ ers, writing his Arcadia in the prose of aristocratic euphuism for the private consumption of a small group of friends who provide the “class nexus that ratifies the elite vision of the romance” (Lennard Davis 28), registers in a number of ways a perturbation with his own prose romance that renders such ratification problematic. The contrast between Sidney’s uneasiness and the hysteria of the American romancers might help us to understand the extent and profundity of the suspicion (sometimes unacknowledged) with which ro mance writers customarily regarded their craft, no matter how far removed they may have been from the sordid demands of the marketplace. It may then be enlightening to explore other instances, from representative prose romances of other periods, of the...