The Historical Romance

Although the historical romance did not have its inception in the United States (Sir Walter Scott and Horace Walpole were the modern European progenitors), American writers in the early to mid-nineteenth century quickly resorted to American history as their subject matter. James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child wrote historical romances showing the positive and negative sides of “manifest destiny,” with the eradication of Native American culture and the destruction of the natural environment being the most horrific upshot of such expansionist thinking. Hawthorne may have argued that America was too young to have a past to mine, but his early romances show precisely the opposite – America already had a past when he published The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). That national past included the story of his own Puritan ancestors, who had participated in a sad chapter of American history during the Salem witch trials.