The snow-image

The Snow Image is the title story of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 collection The Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales. The story is one of his most charming children focused pieces, with the central premise involving two children, Violet and Peony, who build a snow figure during a winter day. Through the wonder and imagination that children bring to such play, the snow figure begins to take on a life of its own, becoming the snow image of the title.

The children’s father, a practical man whose adult perspective cannot accommodate the kind of magical reality that the children inhabit, decides that the snow image must be brought inside to warm up. The tragic consequences of his well meaning practical action drive the rest of the story, with the snow image melting away in the warmth of the parlor that the father has insisted on bringing it into.

Hawthorne uses the simple premise to develop a meditation on the gap between the wondering vision of children and the practical reality of adults, with the suggestion that something genuine and valuable can be lost when adult certainty overrides the kind of magical perception that children bring to the world. The story has been read variously as a sentimental Victorian piece about childhood imagination, as a more serious meditation on the relationship between perception and reality, and as an allegory about the various ways that adult intervention can damage what children have been creating.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, The Snow Image shows him working in a more directly emotional and children focused register. For families with young readers, the story is one of the more accessible Hawthorne shorter pieces and one of the most affecting. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the story is essential.