P defends V. ...

[Robin Landseadel]

	Indeed, Richard Chase suggests in The American Novel and Its
	Tradition that some of America’s greatest novels might properly
	called romances.  In distinguishing between these two forms, Chase
	writes:

		Doubtless the main difference between the novel and the
		romance is the way in which they view reality.  The novel
		renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.  It takes a
		group of people and sets them going about the business of life.
		We come to see these people in their real complexity of
		temperament and motive.  They are in explicable relation to
		nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.
		Character is more important than action and plot, and probably
		the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary
		purpose of enhancing our knowledge of and feeling for an
		important character, a group of characters, or a way of life.  The
		events that occur will usually be plausible, given the
		circumstances, and if the novelist includes a violent or
		sensational occurrence in his plot, he will introduce it only into
		such scenes as have been (in the words of Percy Lubbock)
		‘already prepared to vouch for it.’  Historically, as it has often
		been said, the novel has served the interests and aspirations of
		an insurgent middle class.

		By contrast the romance, following distantly the medieval
		example, feels free to render reality in less volume and detail. It
		tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a
		romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less
		resistance from reality. . . . The romance can flourish without
		providing much intricacy of relation.  The characters, probably
		rather two-dimensional types, will not be complexly related to
		each other or to society or to the past.  Human beings will on
		the whole be shown in ideal relation—that is, they will share
		emotions only after these have become profoundly involved in
		some way, as in Hawthorne or Melville, but it will be a deep and
		narrow, an obsessive, involvement.  In American romance, it
		will not matter much what class people come from, and where
		the novelist would arouse our interest in a character by
		exploring his origin, the romancer will probably do so by
		enveloping it in mystery. Character itself becomes, then,
		somewhat abstract and ideal, so much so in some romances
		that it seems to be merely a function of plot.  The plot we may
		expect to be highly colored.  Astonishing events may occur, and
		these are likely to have a symbolic or ideological, rather than a
		realist, plausibility. Being less committed to the immediate
		rendition of reality than the novel, the romance will more freely
		veer toward mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms.

	Hawthorne himself makes a similar distinction in his preface to
	The House of the Seven Gables (1851), where he explains:

		When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be
		observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as
		to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt
		himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a
		Novel.  The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at
		a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the
		probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.  The
		former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself
		to laws, and while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may
		swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly
		a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great
		extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.  (351)

	Novels such as The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, then, may
	seem fanciful, even dreamy, but they nevertheless explore
	various aspects of something we might call “truth.”

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/amnovel/fall2002/01intro.htm