The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne

REFERENCE

THE CRITICS

ON ORIGINALITY

"The Scarlet Letter," and "The House of the Seven Gables," contain mental qualities which insensibly lead some readers to compare the author to other cherished literary names. Thus we have seen Hawthorne likened for this quality to Goldsmith, and for that to Irving, and for still another to Dickens; and some critics have given him the preference over all whom he seems to resemble. But the real cause for congratulation in the appearance of an original genius like Hawthorne, is not that he dethrones any established prince in literature, but that he founds a new principality of his own.

Edwin Percy Whipple, "The House of the Seven Gables: Humor and Pathos Combined," 1851

ON CHARACTERS

The end of an old race- this is the situation that Hawthorne has depicted, and he has been admirably inspired in the choice of the figures in whom he seeks to interest us. They are all figures rather than characters- they are all pictures rather than persons. But if their reality is light and vague, it is sufficient, and it is in harmony with the low relief and dimness of outline of the objects that surrounded them.

Henry James, Hawthorne, 1879

ON HAWTHORNE AND HIS AGE

The measure in which he intended The House of the Seven Gables as a criticism of his own age is somewhat obscured by his treatment of time. Even while he was examining his changing New England, he felt the past weighing heavily on the present's back. Unlike virtually all the other spokesmen for his day, he could never feel that America was a new world. Looking back over the whole history of his province, he was more struck by decay than by potentiality, by the broken ends to which the Puritan effort had finally come, by the rigidity that had been integral to its thought at its best, by modes of life in which nothing beautiful had developed.

F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 1941.

ON THE SIMPLICITY OF HAWTHORNE'S WRITING

Hawthorne's writing is misleading in its simplicity, which is genuine enough but tempts us to overlook what lies beneath. In the end, simplicity is one of his genuine charms- combined with something else. The essence of Hawthorne is, in fact, distilled from the opposing elements of simplicity and complexity. This essence is a clear liquid, with no apparent cloudiness. Hawthorne, together with Henry James, perhaps, is the only American novelist who has been able to see life whole without, in Thackeray's words, "roaring ai, ai, as loud as Prometheus," like Melville, Wolfe, and Faulkner; droning interminably an account of its details, like Dreiser; or falling into a thin, shrill irony, the batlike twittering of souls in Hades, like all the sad young men.... He is a unique and wonderful combination of light and darkness.

Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, 1952

ON HAWTHORNE AS A MODERN WRITER

Since ours is an age that has found irony, ambiguity, and paradox to be central not only in literature but in life, it is not surprising that Hawthorne has seemed to us one of the most modern of nineteenth- century American writers. The bulk and general excellence of the great outburst of Hawthorne criticism of the past decade attest to his relevance for us. It requires no distortion of him to see him not only as foreshadowing Henry James in his concern for "the deeper psychology" but as first cousin to Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.... Hawthorne's themes, especially, link him with the writing and sensibility of our time.

Hyatt H. Waggoner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1962

ON THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

The final chapter may be a disappointment, there may be other weaknesses, but The House of the Seven Gables remains a remarkable and puzzling novel- and remarkable, perhaps in part, because it is so puzzling. Its incidental pleasures are numerous: the style, with its beautifully equivocal mixture of the colloquial and the elevated, the narrative easing itself backwards and forwards in time, and that peculiar blend of domestic detail and Gothic melodrama about which Hawthorne was, at times, so nervous. Then there are the greater achievements of the book: a narrator playing cunningly with different masks and creating a consistent identity out of them, the complicated series of figurative references which is given coherence and a sense of meaning by the dominating presence of the house. And, above all perhaps, Hawthorne's agnosticism: his willingness to ask questions, and offer different sets of possibilities, in a way that is at once sportive and deeply serious. At his best, indeed, which means in this novel most of the time, Hawthorne makes a positive virtue out of what he sees as necessity and turns uncertainty itself into an art; suspecting that any human category is arbitrary and conjectural, he offers us a conflict between different categories, various idioms and systems, which is only resolved, if at all, by the reader. What it comes down to, in the end, is something very simple: if the book strikes us as a problem then, quite probably, it was meant to. If the old Pyncheon house seems at once intimate and mysterious, a home and a place of imprisonment, then that perhaps is because the man who built it, Nathaniel Hawthorne, saw the world in precisely that way.

Richard Gray, "'Hawthorne: A Problem:' The House of the Seven Gables," 1982

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ADVISORY BOARD

We wish to thank the following educators who helped us focus our Book Notes series to meet student needs and critiqued our manuscripts to provide quality materials.

Sandra Dunn, English Teacher
Hempstead High School, Hempstead, New York

Lawrence J. Epstein, Associate Professor of English
Suffolk County Community College, Selden, New York

Leonard Gardner, Lecturer, English Department
State University of New York at Stony Brook

Beverly A. Haley, Member, Advisory Committee
National Council of Teachers of English Student Guide Series
Fort Morgan, Colorado

Elaine C. Johnson, English Teacher
Tamalpais Union High School District
Mill Valley, California

Marvin J. LaHood, Professor of English
State University of New York College at Buffalo

Robert Lecker, Associate Professor of English
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

David E. Manly, Professor of Educational Studies
State University of New York College at Geneseo

Bruce Miller, Associate Professor of Education
State University of New York at Buffalo

Frank O'Hare, Professor of English and Director of Writing
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Faith Z. Schullstrom, Member of Executive Committee
National Council of Teachers of English
Director of Curriculum and Instruction
Guilderland Central School District, New York

Mattie C. Williams, Director, Bureau of Language Arts
Chicago Public Schools, Chicago, Illinois

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

FURTHER READING
CRITICAL WORKS

Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne's Career. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Fogle, Richard Harter. Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light & The Dark. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952. Examines the complexities of Hawthorne's fiction and includes a chapter on The House of the Seven Gables.

Gray, Richard. "'Hawthorne: A Problem': The House of the Seven Gables" from Nathaniel Hawthorne: New Critical Essays. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982. An essay that discusses the problems inherent in The House of the Seven Gables.

Hall, Lawrence Sargent. Hawthorne: Critic of Society. Yale Studies in English. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1966. A study of the aspects of Hawthorne's life that influenced his social thought.

Hoffman, Daniel G. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.

James, Henry. Hawthorne. London: Macmillan, 1879. Includes chapters on the phases of Hawthorne's literary career, his three American novels, and his travels abroad.

Kaul, A. N., ed. Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, 1966.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. An important critical work on American literature in Hawthorne's time. Includes remarks on Hawthorne's literary theory and practice.

Mellow, James R. Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. An excellent biography of Hawthorne.

Stewart, Randall. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. A biography of Hawthorne beginning with his ancestry and concluding with a chapter on his works, by the editor of his notebooks.

Van Doren, Mark. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Critical Biography. New York: William Sloane, 1949.

Waggoner, Hyatt H. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. A concise look at Hawthorne's life and works.

_____. Hawthorne: A Critical Study. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963.

_____. The Presence of Hawthorne. Baton Rouge, Louisiana and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Collected essays.

Warren, Austin. Rage for Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. Contains a chapter on Hawthorne, with an interesting look at The House of the Seven Gables.

Woodberry, George E. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902.

AUTHOR'S OTHER WORKS

The following works were published during Hawthorne's lifetime:

Fanshawe, 1828
Twice-Told Tales, 1837
Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846
The Scarlet Letter, 1850
The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales, 1851
The Blithedale Romance, 1852
The Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852
A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, 1852
Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys, 1853
The Marble Faun, 1860
Our Old Home, 1863

The following works were published after Hawthorne's death:

Passages from the American Note-books (edited by his wife), 1868
Passages from the English Note-books (edited by his wife), 1870
Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (edited by his son), 1883
The American Notebooks (edited by Randall Stewart), 1932
The English Notebooks (edited by Randall Stewart), 1941
Hawthorne as Editor: Selections from His Writings in the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (edited by Arlin Turner), 1941
Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (edited by Edward H. Davidson), 1954
Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne (foreword by C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr.), 1972
Hawthorne's Lost Notebook: 1835-1841 (Transcript by Barbara S. Mouffe), 1978

A STEP BEYOND

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