Fancy’s Show-Box

Fancy’s Show Box is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his 1837 collection Twice Told Tales. The story is a brief moral allegory in the format that Hawthorne worked in across many of his shorter pieces, with the central premise being an examination of how the imagination relates to actual moral guilt.

The show box of the title is the imagined collection of pictures that the personified figure of Fancy presents to the central character, the wealthy and respectable old gentleman Mr. Smith. The pictures show various sins and crimes that Mr. Smith might have committed across his life but that he in fact never actually did. Hawthorne uses the situation to develop the wider question of whether the entertainment of evil thoughts in the imagination, even without ever acting on them, constitutes some form of moral guilt that the strictly external standards of behavior would not recognize.

The story is one of his more directly philosophical shorter pieces, with the allegorical framework giving him room to engage with the kind of moral question that the deeper Puritan tradition that shaped his thinking had long worked through. The closing section of the story turns toward the recognition that while the imaginary sins do not produce the same kind of moral burden as actual committed acts, they nonetheless point to inclinations and desires within the heart that the strictly external moral standards would not address.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Fancy’s Show Box shows him working in compressed allegorical form on questions that his major novels also engaged with at greater length. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the story is essential.