Framing The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Framing The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Historical Context 1830: The Indian Removal Act (Trail of Tears) 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion 1832: The Black Hawk War 1835: The Second Seminole War 1833: Slavery abolished in Britain 1846: U.S. War with Mexico (annexation of Texas and

California) 1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 1851: Land Law of 1851 essentially overturns the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo

Literary Context 1815: Frankenstein (Shelley) 1845: The Raven (Poe) 1851: Moby Dick (Melville) 1852: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 1855: Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 1859: The Origin of Species (Darwin) 1899: The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)

Interpretative Inroads 1: The Work the House Does

Embodies family’s physical presence in society; enacts generational influence; preserves family’s “fortune”

Greed for property motivates original crime Colonel Pyncheon’s status facilitates the

expropriation of Maule’s property; property begets property

Passage on p. 18 – 19, beginning “Matthew Maule, on the other hand…”; consider Maule as metonymy for earlier and more primal American land-grab

The Work the House Does, Cont’d The house appears to be haunted; the past imposes itself

on the present through the house’s structure The “haunting” (which appears in the present-day

narrative as an ongoing fixation with the family’s past, unfixed fortunes) introduces temporal disruptions, instabilities, and uncertainty

The uncertain temporality of the narrative opens the question of reparations: to what extent is a descendant responsible for the crimes of an ancestor?

Passages on p. 14 & 16 first raise the question of reparation; connect this question to other forms of reparation of concern during Hawthorne’s historical moment

Interpretive Inroads 2: Reflecting on Representation

Representation as a reflection of inner truths? Holgrave’s daguerreotypes and the portrait of Pyncheon seem instantiations of the mirror reputed to have been placed in the house by Maule’s son

Hawthorne’s prose as pictorially descriptive but also highly self-conscious and self-consciously unreliable

Passage on p. 14 The unreliable narrator and issues of genre: turn to

the Introduction, consider the use or purposes of representation