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It is fairly common today to find novels written with a knowledge of Freudian psychology which invite a Freudian interpretation. Novels of the past barely hint at repressed inner conflicts. Despite Richardson's “knowledge of the human heart,” the author assumes that Pamela's motives are consistent, genuine and sufficient to justify the conclusion of the plot. The very title declares the absence of inner conflict: virtue will be materially rewarded. The amazing fact about Hawthorne is that he senses intra-psychic conflict before Freud and although he had no public support, challenged prevailing opinion.
Living when and where he did, Hawthorne's challenge had to be masked from both the public and himself. It was not possible for him to deny the authority of a superego formed by Puritan ethics which insisted that conduct can be governed consciously through the use of will. Yet, he understood the dark underworld beneath the “idealism” of the surface. He managed to repress this in his personal life, I think, by sublimating the conflict in his fiction. This is so clearly the case that Crews' job can also be clear-cut. He does not need to impose facts from the biography to interpret episodes in the fiction. He need only stick to the evidence of the novels themselves; for no earlier novelist has so extensively put psychoanalytic thinking into his text, with the exception of Lawrence, who had the advantage of living after Freud. Lawrence was not working against the dominant attitudes of his era, and could therefore write with some relaxation. But Hawthorne was, and the price he paid, as Crews points out, was exaggeration. His superego was crammed with an “idealism” Lawrence was only too happy