Hawthorne’s choice of a scene for his story and the detail of his explanation of that scene are absolutely essential to his romances. He was always looking for a fairy land, similar to the real world, because he felt that there was hardly any strange, antique, or pictorial enchantment in America. Thus, he had to create a world resembling such a fairy land in his American romances.
His wife, Sophia, exerted a great influence upon his Italian romances. Most of the references to Italy and the Italian culture appear in works after meeting Sophia. After serving four years as a consul in Liverpool, England, Hawthorne and his family spent two winters in Italy, where he found materials that made his romances easier to write than they had been. In Italy he found a land naturally possessing a half-mysterious but definitely real atmosphere ; furthermore he found a world, in which time—the past, the present, and the eternity—was manifest and observable.
Italy resolved his recurring dilemma between a novel and a romance by enabling him simply to copy observations he had recorded in his journals, especially The French and Italian Notebooks. In my brief survey I have attempted to study the influence of Hawthorne’s stay in Italy upon his romances.
