Character must be exaggerated to appear natural

Fictitious characters, like the plots that they develop, are based
primarily on fact, and they further resemble the plots in being
different phases of a primal idea, rather than intrinsically diverse.
We find many characters in fiction--Miss Wilkins' stories are full
of them--which are evidently meant to be realistic, and which impress
us as word photographs of existing persons; yet it is improbable that
they are exact reproductions. A real person ordinarily has too much
of the commonplace and conventional about him to serve in fiction,
where--despite the apparent paradox--a character must be exaggerated
to appear natural. A person in fiction is at the best but a blur of
hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, and can be comprehended only
through the mentality of the author; therefore his description, his
actions, his words, his very thoughts must be made so unnaturally
striking that through the sense of sight alone they will stimulate
the imagination and produce the effect which actual contact with the
real person would induce. The character which seems most real is
usually a composite of the most striking characteristics of several
real persons. To this source of fictitious characters is due the fact
that a literary puppet is often thought to be the reproduction of
several very different real persons; for the reader, recognizing a
particular trait which is characteristic of some one of his
acquaintance, thinks that he recognizes the character.
"While the popular idea that every creature of the novelist's
imagination has a definite original somewhere among his acquaintances
is, of course, egregiously false, it has yet this much of truth,
that they are, to a large extent, suggestions from life. Not one
person, but half a dozen, often sit as models for the same picture,
while the details are filled out by the writer's imagination. There
are few people in real life sufficiently interesting or uncommonplace
to suit the novelist's purpose, but he must idealize or intensify
them before they are fit subjects for art. Dickens intensified to the
verge of the impossible, yet we never feel that Dick Swiveller and
Sam Weller and Mr. Micawber, and the rest of them, are unnatural;
they are only, if I may coin the word, 'hypernatural.' It is the
business of art to idealize. Even at its best art is so inferior to
nature, that in order to produce the same impression it has to
intensify its effects; to deepen the colors, heighten the contrasts,
omit an object here, exaggerate an outline there, and so on, until it
has produced the proper picturesque effect."
A careful description of the appearance of the characters may be
necessary to the understanding of the story, as in Irving's perfect
picture of Ichabod Crane in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"; but in our
model the people are rather typical than individual, and Hawthorne
devotes but little space to their external characteristics. A word or
a phrase suffices to tell us all that is necessary to enable our
minds to body them forth. Even the hero is outwardly distinguished
only by a melancholy expression--a slight of which no school-girl
"authoress" would have been guilty. It is more often necessary to
give the mental characteristics of the puppets, and in "The Ambitious
Guest" we have a deal of such detail concerning the young stranger;
but here, too, you must exercise forbearance, as Hawthorne did in his
partial analysis of the other characters.
Category:Character