INTRODUCTION

The House of the Seven Gables (1851) was the second of three novels Nathaniel Hawthorne published in rapid succession at the beginning of the 1850s, following The Scarlet Letter (1850) and preceding The Blithedale Romance (1852). While these novels secured Hawthorne’s enduring literary reputation, his career as a professional writer had in fact begun more than two decades earlier. In 1828, three years after graduating from Bowdoin College, he had published a novel called Fanshawe, which reached few readers and which he soon sought to suppress. Then, in 1830, he began publishing sketches and tales in newspapers, magazines, and annuals—all anonymously. His first collection of these short pieces, Twice-Told Tales, did not appear until 1837. Hawthorne earned little money from the magazines or from the collection (which sold only 600 or 700 copies), but Twice-Told Tales at least named him as its author, and the book elicited some positive reviews, including valuable praise from Hawthorne’s Bowdoin classmate, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Boston’s prestigious North American Review.1

Over the next thirteen years Hawthorne continued to publish in magazines. He produced three books of popular history designed for children (and clearly, as well, for making money) in 1840 and 1841. And there were two more story collections: an expanded edition of Twice-Told Tales in 1842 and Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846. The latter was published in New York as part of Wiley and Putnam’s new ‘Library of American Books’, edited by Evert Duyckinck—a short-lived but important series that also included Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales (1845) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845) and Herman Melville’s Typee (1846). But Hawthorne’s writings in the 1830s and 1840s never came close to supporting him, and he had to earn his principal living by other means: an abortive career as a magazine editor in 1836; a Democratic political appointment in the Boston Custom House in 1839–40; a brief stint at the Brook Farm Utopian Community, outside Boston, in 1841; and another political appointment as surveyor at the Salem Custom House, from 1846 until he was removed by the new Whig administration in Washington in 1849. By 1849 Hawthorne had been married for seven years, to Sophia Peabody, and they had two children (a third child would be born in 1851). Even with the Custom House job, support was still a problem—in 1849 Nathaniel, Sophia, and the children were living with Hawthorne’s mother and sisters—and work at the Custom House left little or no time for writing. Hawthorne was at this point a professional writer only in a rather attenuated sense.

The Scarlet Letter—to which Hawthorne turned in the summer of 1849, following his removal from the Custom House in June and the death of his mother in July—ended up significantly transforming his literary status. This transformation was in large measure the accomplishment of his new publisher, Boston’s James T. Fields.2 Hawthorne conceived and wrote The Scarlet Letter as a long ‘tale’, to be the centrepiece of yet another collection, but Fields talked him into publishing it as a novel, with the autobiographical sketch, ‘The Custom-House’, as introduction. Fields also promoted the book skilfully and successfully, arranging for advertising and, less openly, for favourable reviews. The Scarlet Letter was by no means a ‘best-seller’; while it sold 6,000 copies in its first year, one should note that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, two years later, sold 300,000 copies in its first year. But the commercial and critical impact of The Scarlet Letter was unprecedented in Hawthorne’s experience, and Fields did everything in his power to capitalize on his author’s new fame. Early in 1851 he brought out a new edition of Twice-Told Tales, with a new preface by the author; in the same year (in addition to publishing The House of the Seven Gables) he reissued the children’s histories of 1840–1 as True Stories from History and Biography, and Hawthorne wrote (and Fields published) a new book of mythology for young readers, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. In 1852 Fields would publish (in addition to The Blithedale Romance) a ‘new’ Hawthorne collection (containing mostly old, previously uncollected work) called The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales. A continuation of A Wonder-Book, called Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys, would follow in 1853, and in 1854, when he finally secured the copyright from Wiley and Putnam, Fields brought out a new edition of Mosses from an Old Manse.

This information about the marketing of Hawthorne in the early 1850s is relevant to The House of the Seven Gables for at least two reasons. Most obviously, the success of The Scarlet Letter provided an incentive for producing a new work—and for producing it as rapidly as possible. Hawthorne began The House of the Seven Gables in August 1850, only five months after publishing The Scarlet Letter, and he predicted to Fields that the new novel would be done by November. For his own part, Fields was applying plenty of pressure; already in October of 1850 he was advertising the new book. Hawthorne’s November prediction proved over-optimistic, but not by much; he completed The House of the Seven Gables in January 1851, less than a year after finishing The Scarlet Letter, and the new novel was published in April. The sudden change in Hawthorne’s professional status has another, deeper relevance to The House of the Seven Gables. The ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’ who set to work on the new novel in the summer of 1850 was quite different from the ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’ who had written The Scarlet Letter, and he knew it. He had moved from Salem to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, where he planned to support himself and his family by writing. He clearly intended his new book to register or ratify the recent transformation of his literary identity. And on many levels, both superficial and fundamental, this transformation informs the action and meaning, the very fabric, of The House of the Seven Gables.

In January 1851, as he was finishing The House of the Seven fables, Hawthorne took time off to write a brief preface for fields’ new edition of Twice-Told Tales. He used the occasion to reflect on his past status as, in his words, ‘the obscurest man of letters in America’ and to deprecate the writings Fields was reissuing. These early tales and sketches, he wrote, ‘have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade’. ‘The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.’3 The imagery here is important and characteristic; sunshine is associated with everyday reality, while pallor and shade are associated with tameness and unreality.

Hawthorne often lamented the seclusion of the so-called ‘solitary years’ between his graduation from Bowdoin in 1825 and the publication of the first edition of Twice-Told Tales in 1837, years when he lived alone in Salem in a room in his mother’s house, writing. In the 1851 preface he is striving to distance himself from this early association of literature with isolation, and even, perhaps, to revise his earlier literary motives. His early tales, he writes, ‘are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart, … but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world’. Thus Hawthorne claims the only merit he can now find in these early tales is that they ‘have opened the way to most agreeable associations, and to the formation of imperishable friendships’ (CE, IX, 6–7). In The Scarlet Letter and in such stories as ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ (1844), Hawthorne had clearly linked creativity and imaginative power with isolation, but here he insists that his motives have been social from the first and that the movement of his career has been from insubstantiality to reality, from seclusion to social intercourse. A similar movement underlies The House of the Seven Gables—where it is also figured, at times even obsessively, as a transformation of shade into sunshine.

The same figure dominates Hawthorne’s comments on the differences he saw, or intended, between The House of the Seven Gables and its predecessor. He complained to Fields that while writing The Scarlet Letter ‘I found it impossible to relieve the shadows of the story with so much light as I would gladly have thrown in’; to his friend Horatio Bridge he wrote that the narrative ‘lacks sunshine’, that it is ‘positively a h-ll-fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light’ (CE, XVI, 307, 311–12). In the midst of writing The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne wrote to Fields that the story ‘darkens damnably towards the close, but I shall try hard to pour some setting sunshine over it’; he later commented to Evert Duyckinck that ‘in writing it, I suppose I was illuminated by my purpose to bring it to a prosperous close; while the gloom of the past threw its shadow along the reader’s pathway’ (CE, xvi, 376, 421). The literalness with which Hawthorne took this ‘purpose’ is indicated by the prevalence of sunshine and ‘natural’ blooming towards the end of The House of the Seven Gables (in the chapters entitled ‘Alice’s Posies’ and ‘The Flower of Eden’) and by the significance to the book’s sunny conclusion of Phoebe Pyncheon. ‘Phoebe’ was one of Hawthorne’s nicknames for his wife, and Sophia Hawthorne reacted to the final chapters of The House of the Seven Gables exactly as her husband would have wished. ‘Mr. Hawthorne read me the close, last evening’, she wrote in January, 1851. ‘There is unspeakable grace and beauty in the conclusion, throwing back upon the sterner tragedy of the commencement an ethereal light, and a dear home-loveliness and satisfaction’—with ‘the flowers of Paradise scattered over all the dark places’.4 (By contrast, Hawthorne reported that when he read his wife the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter, ‘It broke her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache’ (CE, XVI, 3II).)

Hawthorne’s professed goal in The House of the Seven Gables was, most essentially, to certify his own normalcy by transforming or simply disowning whatever might have seemed abnormal in his literary past. In a letter to Duyck-inck, thanking him for a favourable review, he wrote: ‘It appears to me that you like the book better than the Scarlet Letter; and I certainly think it a more natural and healthy product of my mind, and felt less reluctance in publishing it.’ He wrote to Bridge, in a similar vein: ‘I think it a work more characteristic of my mind, and more proper and natural for me to write, than the Scarlet Letter’ (CE, XVI, 421, 461). Herman Melville—Hawthorne’s neighbour in the Berk-shires, who in the summer of 1851 was completing his own ‘h-11-fired’ romance of the whale fisheries—praised what he saw as the secret defiance of The House of the Seven Gables: ‘There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne’, he wrote in a letter to Hawthorne. ‘He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie’.5 Reviewers, however, mostly stressed the book’s healthy, ‘natural’ propriety. ‘The impression which it leaves on the reader’s mind’, said an anonymous writer in The Christian Examiner, ‘is … much pleasanter than that produced by its predecessor’, and the Southern Quarterly Review, for similar reasons, thought The House of the Seven Gables‘a more truthful book’ than The Scarlet Letter. Amory Dwight Mayo, a Unitarian minister surveying Hawthorne’s career in the Universalist Quarterly, described a ‘tendency to disease’ in Hawthorne’s nature, ‘a sort of unnaturalness in his world’, a tendency that ‘reached its climax in the “Scarlet Letter”’. But in The House of the Seven Gables, Mayo proclaimed, ‘we see the author struggling out of its grasp, with a vigor which we believe ensures a final recovery’.6

We might also describe the self-transformation Hawthorne hoped to demonstrate in The House of the Seven Gables in terms of a shift in genre, a shift in the kind of fiction he wished to write, or to be seen as writing. In the famous first paragraph of his preface, Hawthorne insists that he has chosen to write a ‘Romance’—permitting ‘a certain latitude’, especially with respect to incorporating ‘the Marvellous’—rather than a ‘Novel’—requiring ‘a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience’ (I).7 The distinction Hawthorne makes here and in other prefaces, similar to the contrast between unreal ‘twilight’ and healthy ‘sunshine’ in the 1851 preface to Twice-Told Tales, has produced a good deal of critical controversy over just what he meant by ‘romance’, and has even led some critics to argue that the major tradition of nineteenth-century American fiction was a tradition of ‘romance’ as contrasted with the supposedly ‘novelistic’ tradition of British fiction.8 Yet Hawthorne’s preface, in context, is a bit misleading: he well knew that in The House of the Seven Gables he was in important respects moving away from the romantic into something like novelistic realism. ‘Many passages of this book’, he wrote to Fields in November, 1850, ‘ought to be finished with the minuteness of a Dutch picture, in order to give them their proper effect’ (CE, xvi, 371).

Hawthorne clearly associated this realistic ‘minuteness’ (foreshadowing the ‘minute fidelity’ he would cite, in his preface, as characterizing the ‘Novel’) with what made the book ‘a more natural and healthy product of my mind’, ‘more proper and natural for me to write’, and once again his most sympathetic critics got the point. Henry T. Tuckerman—in a review in the Southern Literary Messenger, for which Hawthorne expressed deep gratitude—praised the book’s ‘local authenticity’; in its details, he wrote, ‘we have the truth, simplicity and exact imitation of the Flemish painters’, and its sketches of background are ‘so life-like in the minutiæ … that they are daguerreotyped in the reader’s mind’. Amory Dwight Mayo, who saw in The House of the Seven Gables signs of ‘recovery’ from the ‘disease’ and ‘unnaturalness’ of The Scarlet Letter, wrote of the later book that, ‘as a whole, it is nearer actual life, and more comprehensively true to human nature, than any former work of its author’.9

Whatever its meanings for twentieth-century critics, ‘romance’ had some clear and fairly uncomplicated associations for Hawthorne’s contemporaries. It was linked, above all, with the tradition of Gothic romance—the mode popularized in England in the 1790s by Ann Radcliffe, which relies on apparently haunted mansions, secret chambers, bleeding statues, and other seeming supernatural horrors, all of which are explained rationally at the close. From the very beginning of his career, Hawthorne had drawn on the tradition of Gothic romance, and there are plenty of Gothic props and conventions in The House of the Seven Gables, from the house itself to the mysterious painting to ‘Maule’s Curse’ on the male descendants of Colonel Pyncheon. At the close all of this gets explained away in good Radcliffean fashion: Maule’s curse, for instance, turns out to be only a hereditary (if strangely selective) propensity towards apoplexy. But the undermining of Gothic sensationalism in The House of the Seven Gables goes far beyond the conventions of Radcliffean rational explanation: throughout the novel the Gothic is persistently subjected to sarcastic mockery. For instance, as Phoebe prepares an Indian cake, the narrator speculates that ‘perchance … the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonder-ingly on’ (99)—or when Phoebe imagines that Jaffrey Pyncheon is a ghostly reincarnation of his ancestor, the Colonel, the narrator wonders if ‘on his arrival from the other world, he had merely found it necessary to spend a quarter-of-an-hour at a barber’s’, and had then visited ‘a ready-made clothing establishment’ (120). Nor does Phoebe, confronted with the mysteries of the decaying Pyncheon mansion, have much in common with the quivering heroines of Ann Rad-cliffe; she is never frightened, we are repeatedly told that she is not ‘morbid’, and on her first night in her cobwebby and desolate bedchamber (always a moment of titillating terror in Gothic romances) she simply uses her ‘gift of practical arrangement’ to give the room ‘a look of comfort and habitab-leness’ (71). And there is something deeper than mockery of the Gothic at work in the novel’s ending. The scene of Judge Pyncheon’s death becomes the setting for, and in a sense the guarantee of, the love of Phoebe and Holgrave. The haunted house is not simply, as we might put it, de-Gothicized; as the sunshine returns, and as Alice’s posies bloom on the roof, in the angle between the two front gables, it is also domesticated. One recalls Sophia Hawthorne’s blissful comment on the ‘dear home-loveliness and satisfaction’ of the ending. At the book’s close, the haunted house of Gothic romance gets transformed into the feminized ‘home’ of realistic, domestic fiction.

With all of its apparent accommodations to accepted notions of the ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’, The House of the Seven Gables might have been expected to be more popular than The Scarlet Letter. In the long run, such expectations were not borne out; in its first thirteen years the later book sold 11,550 copies, as compared to 13,500 for its predecessor,10 and it is The Scarlet Letter that has come to be regarded as Hawthorne’s masterpiece. The ultimate success of The Scarlet Letter may in fact be connected to what contemporary readers saw as its unhealthy morbidness; even Amory Dwight Mayo, who thought the later novel ‘more comprehensively true to human nature, than any former work of its author’, stated flatly, and without any apparent recognition of paradox, that ‘the “House of the Seven Gables” is inferior to the “Scarlet Letter” in artistic proportion, compactness and sustained power’.11 Still, The House of the Seven Gables continues to be read and admired almost a century and a half after its publication, and it actually had slightly better sales than its predecessor in its first year (6,710 copies as compared to 6,000).12 Such sales were at least sufficient to sustain Hawthorne at his new creative pace. ‘As long as people will buy’, he wrote to his friend Bridge, ‘I shall keep at work; and I find that my facility of labor increases with the demand for it’ (CE, XVI, 462). One also suspects that financial considerations, while they clearly mattered to Hawthorne, may have been somewhat less important to him than the psychological or vocational transformation he wished to accomplish or affirm with The House of the Seven Gables, the transformation of the isolated artist into the man who had supposedly always sought, through his writing, ‘to open an intercourse with the world’. In this sense Mayo may have been right about Hawthorne’s ambition for The House of the Seven Gables: it would be ‘better’ than The Scarlet Letter precisely because it would be less ‘artistic’.

Hawthorne’s desire to leave his old literary identity behind gets thematized in his novel in a more general repudiation of the past, of the weight of history. Nothing more clearly distinguishes The House of the Seven Gables from The Scarlet Letter than its interest in what the Preface calls ‘the realities of the moment’ (3)—its concern for the enumeration of up-to-the-minute facts and details of mid-nineteenth-century American culture. The Explanatory Notes to this edition gloss, for instance, numerous references to what were still, in 1851, recent technological innovations: galvanic batteries, daguerreotypes (the precursors of modern photographs), railroads, the telegraph, transatlantic Cunard steamships. There are references to mid-century American politics, for instance to the newly formed Free Soil party, and Hawthorne’s attack on Jaffrey Pyncheon is clearly aimed, more generally, at the Whig Party that had removed him from his position at the Salem Custom House in 1849.13 Perhaps the largest number of contemporary references, many of them associated with Holgrave, cluster around mid-century reform movements and fads: temperance lectures, Utopian communes, hypnotism or mesmerism, spiritualism, public seances, and other forms of popular pseudo-science.

The House of the Seven Gables engages its contemporary ‘moment’ in other, more fundamental ways. The book seeks to assess the moral or spiritual significance of rapid innovations in technology and social and political culture, hoping to find here more instances of healthy transformation. Also, the book’s interest in up-to-date, novelistic social realism seems to signal a corresponding interest in social or political criticism. Hawthorne describes the book’s supposed moral, in the preface, as ‘the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, whereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms’ (2). One thinks of what Hawthorne’s friend and former Concord neighbour, Henry Thoreau, would say in Walden (1854) about the misfortune of those who ‘have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools’: ‘How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!’14 Thoreau’s alternative to this burden was of course the radical simplicity of his own experimental Utopia, his socialist community of one at Walden Pond. The alternative imagined by The House of the Seven Gables is considerably more difficult to locate, and this difficulty brings us at once to the famous problem of the novel’s ending—of the way it transforms darkness and isolation into sociable sunshine in order to achieve the closing ‘home-loveliness and satisfaction’ that so gratified Sophia Hawthorne.

Hawthorne’s hopes for the transformative moral-political power of contemporary innovations seem most fully embodied in the character of Holgrave. He is introduced as a radical reformer, an incarnation of change, a man of the ‘moment’ with a particular hostility towards the past as embodied in old houses. He believes that ‘in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew’ (179). In the end, with Judge Pyncheon a dead corpse, Holgrave’s ideas might seem to be vindicated: Holgrave’s marriage to Phoebe certifies the triumph of light over darkness, of the present over the ‘moss-grown and rotten Past’. But when Holgrave, Phoebe, Clifford, and Hepzibah move out of the House of the Seven Gables, it is only to move into another of Judge Pyncheon’s properties, his country house. Since Holgrave is a descendant of Matthew Maule, we might justify this accession to property as a matter of political justice, of the heir of dispossession coming at last into his own. What has been more troubling to many readers of The House of the Seven Gables is the astonishing rapidity with which Holgrave’s new status swings him from political radicalism to conservatism; he even wishes the judge had built his country house out of stone rather than wood, so that it might last longer. This abrupt transformation seems to ignore Hawthorne’s earlier sense of the genuine burden of property; at the same time, it seems to undermine retroactively the seriousness of Holgrave’s politics.

The rapid shift in Holgrave’s political principles certainly presents problems for the reader; even Phoebe exclaims, in amazement: ‘how wonderfully your ideas are changed!’ (315). Yet to concentrate on this aspect of Holgrave’s thinking may be to exaggerate the novel’s interest in political ideas. We should at least recognize that Hawthorne’s sense of the burden of property is very different from Thoreau’s. What matters to Thoreau as false economy, as excess accumulation, matters to Hawthorne above all as inheritance; property is a burden, for Hawthorne, not because it is grotesquely disproportionate to actual need but because it is transmitted from the past—because ownership, founded on an act of forced appropriation, is inevitably associated with guilt. Hence the preface’s other formulation of the book’s supposed moral: ‘the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief’ (2). Or as Clifford puts it during the brief exhilaration of his escape with Hepzibah: ‘What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests’ (263). So the basis of Hawthorne’s social criticism has less to do with economy, in Thoreau’s sense, than with psychology, and what is therefore needed to bring his novel to a prosperous conclusion is not a Holgravian political revolution, a general redistribution of wealth, but some sort of expiation or absolution—more in the therapeutic sense, perhaps, than in the religious.

To some extent the conclusion does provide something like absolution; at least it labours mightily to dispose of all traces of guilt. Clifford, long imprisoned for the supposed murder of his uncle, is revealed to be innocent, and his uncle turns out not even to have been murdered. The rift between the Pyncheons and Maules, originating in the crime of dispossessing and executing Matthew Maule, is repaired when Holgrave, having revealed his Maule ancestry, marries Phoebe.15 Most notably, the novel’s sense of inherited evil is displaced on to the house, and especially on to Judge Pyn-cheon—and then exorcised. The death of the Judge, so the ending wants to assure us, signals the end of Matthew Maule’s curse on the Pyncheons.

Nevertheless, problems remain. Clifford may be innocent of his uncle’s murder, but his delight in the Judge’s death, resembling the narrator’s protracted exultation over the corpse in Ch. XVIII, suggests that he has at least wished to be rid of his cousin; and his praise of progress in Ch. XVII, as he and Hepzibah escape on the railroad, keeps threatening to turn into a confession of a crime he has not technically committed. If the Judge’s death promises liberation, it also quite literally recapitulates the very past from which it seems to offer escape, the death of Colonel Pyncheon—just as, for example, Hepzibah’s persistent knocking on the door of the silent parlour repeats the knocking on the same door on the day of the Colonel’s death. Also, as guilt is displaced in order to be exorcized, it paradoxically gets only more generally diffused; even Holgrave, after Phoebe’s return, confesses that ‘the presence of yonder dead man … made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of guilt, and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt’ (306). The conclusion finally offers more mystification than absolution of guilt, and for a fairly simple reason. Whether in religious or therapeutic contexts, guilt usually needs to be acknowledged before it can be overcome, and here it is simply denied or escaped, as everyone climbs into a carriage to head for the country.

Readers have long debated the coherence of the ending of Hawthorne’s novel, and they will surely continue to do so. There should be less debate about what is at stake in this ending. What it means for the surviving characters to leave the House of the Seven Gables finally turns out to be much the same as what it meant for Hawthorne to write The House of the Seven Gables, or at least what he wanted the writing of the book to mean. To leave the house is to move from darkness into sunshine, from morbid isolation into healthy sociability and normalcy, from the past into the present, from the world of the romance into the world of the novel. What remains unclear is the extent to which Hawthorne, however much he wished to do so, was able to believe in these transformations. When Phoebe returns to the house—her ‘healthful presence’ confronting ‘the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms’ that occupy it—the narrator praises her ‘gift of making things look real, rather than fantastic, within her sphere’ (297). Proclaiming Clifford’s innocence and identifying with the influence of Phoebe’s ‘sphere’, the ending of The House of the Seven Gables endeavours to dismiss all guilt as fantasy, as romance. But Hawthorne had long known that to identify guilt with fantasy was hardly to render it powerless. In an 1837 sketch, ‘Fancy’s Show Box’, he had meditated on the guilt arising from deeds contemplated but never perpetrated. ‘Man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest’, the sketch concludes, ‘since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity’ (CE, IX, 226). This understanding of the link between guilt and fantasy lies at the heart of much of Hawthorne’s writing from the 1830s down to The Scarlet Letter. It is above all this understanding that the ending of The House of the Seven Gables—endorsing sunshine, healthy normalcy, novelistic realism, in a word, Phoebe—seeks to leave behind.