A distinction has long been recognized between the realistic novel and the prose romance. I argue that there is a form of prose fiction which resembles the romance in several ways but which cannot be classified as a romance according to prevalent theories mainly because it has a strong ethical center and because it is not a distinctly American form as Richard Chase, in The American Novel and Its Tradition, and others have argued. The problem goes beyond the controversy about national temperament begun by Chase to the larger question of fictional forms and our criteria for judging them. Authors who have written novels of this kind, which I call the ethical novel, include Hawthorne, Hardy, James, Lawrence, and Faulkner. This different kind of novel uses certain elements of the romance to demonstrate that we are inevitably part of a moral and ethical system, that in experience each and every action has moral and ethical significance. It is the temperamental quality of the author's mind, completely outside the question of national temperament, that gives this kind of novel its thematic and structural character. A close reading of a major novel of each author, The Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, and Light in August respectively, demonstrates that the ethical center and the fictional devices used to express it (from narrative voice to prose style) are the sources of the unity and therefore the strength of the novel