THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of the William Hawthorne who had emigrated to New England with the first generation of Puritan settlers in 1630. Hawthorne’s interest in the history and legend of his region was revealed in his early stories, which began to appear in print in the 1830s. New England Puritanism and its legacy provided Hawthorne with the means of exploring many of the themes that concerned him deeply, among them the conflict between patriarchal authority and the impulse to a variety of freedoms, including the freedom of the artist. Though he immersed himself in the early literature of New England, Hawthorne’s own writings are peculiarly modern in some of their leading characteristics. One is the self-reflexiveness of narratives which make the telling a part of the tale. Another is the concern with signifying practices, with the relationships between objects (a Red Cross, a Black Veil, a Scarlet Letter) and what they come to signify.
Never willing to submit to the conventions of the realist novel, when he abandoned the short story and the sketch for longer works, Hawthorne claimed the imaginative freedom of the romance. His first—The Scarlet Letter—was published in 1850 and brought him immediate critical recognition, if not financial success. In quick succession he completed two more romances—The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852)—and consolidated his position as a major writer of his day. After his appointment as consul at Liverpool and Manchester in 1853 Hawthorne produced no more fiction until 1860, when The Marble Faun was published. Returning to Massachusetts in that year after travels in France and Italy, he struggled to finish other romances but left them uncompleted at his death in 1864.
MICHAEL DAVITT BELL is J. Leland Miller Professor of American History, Literature, and Eloquence in the Department of English at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation and other works on nineteenth-century American literature.