The Hall of Fantasy

The Hall of Fantasy is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in The Pioneer magazine in 1843 and collected in Mosses from an Old Manse three years later. It is one of his allegorical sketches and one of the most direct of his commentaries on literary life and the writers of his own day.

The story is set in an imaginary hall, a great marble building full of statues and portraits of the famous writers of all ages. The narrator wanders through the hall with a friend, and the friend points out the figures most worth attention. There is a small irony built in. The hall is open to writers of all eras and all merit, and the friend is willing to praise figures the narrator finds doubtful. They argue mildly about who deserves to be there and who has been let in by mistake.

The second half of the sketch is the more interesting part. The hall is also a place where living people of certain kinds gather, particularly reformers, projectors, and enthusiasts of every cause. Hawthorne sets up small portraits of various American types of the 1840s, the abolitionist, the temperance reformer, the inventor with the perpetual motion scheme, the millennialist preacher. He treats them with a mixed tone that is somewhere between affection and gentle satire, recognising the genuine hope in their projects while also noticing the futility.

The story is about fifteen pages and runs as a sequence of sketches rather than a plot. It is best read alongside The Celestial Railroad and A Select Party from the same collection, both of which use a similar allegorical setting to make commentary on contemporary American life. For readers interested in the literary culture of New England in the 1840s, this is one of the more direct Hawthorne pieces. It also pairs naturally with Emerson’s essays from the same period, since many of the figures Hawthorne is gently mocking are recognisable as Emerson’s correspondents and friends.