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This article starts with the outrageous interventions of the narrator of “Wakefield” in order to question more broadly the use of “scenes” inside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction. It goes through the corpus assembled by James McIntosh in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, looking for the scene/summary tempo identified by Gérard Genette, and finding that several of Hawthorne’s narrators push it off balance. While we come to see that the Hawthorne “scene” is defined first and foremost by the spectators who witness it, we move on from there to question what is tucked away by the narrator-directors (Genette) who look away from domestic settings—particularly in “Wakefield,” a text to which we return in more detail, this time placing the narrator center-stage.