To examine how the narrative structure of "The Artist of the Beautiful" leads up to the climactic moment of the butterfly's appearance is to recognize Hawthorne's endorsement not only of Owen Warland but also, more significantly, of the transcendent power of imagination over the empirical orientation of nineteenth-century America. When the tale is analyzed in relation to its contemporaneously composed counterpart, "Drowne's Wooden Image," it becomes clear that Hawthorne believes that imaginative art can make believers out of observers whose typically no-nonsense version of reality aligns them with Locke and the Scottish Common Sense philosopher. This belief extends to careful readers of Hawthorne, who can, with the help of Wolfgang Iser's work on the fictive and the imaginary, cast aside their dependence on mimesis and allow the momentous butterfly to work its magic.
University of California Press