Passport essay

Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables

Introduction:

The central moral lesson of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is that “the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and…becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” The physical embodiment of this continuity of sinning throughout the history of a family is represented by the eponymous house. Colonel Pyncheon comes to own it through his deceitful maneuverings, and for generations afterwards his descendents pay the price of his ill-doing by their own limitations; it seems the house that was bestowed upon them is what traps them. As declining aristocrats, they are one with the house, which is in a state of decline as well. Using Freud’s concept of the uncanny, this essay examines the way in which the House of the Seven Gables functions as an unheimlich site of familial continuity and estrangement from self.

Reading:

1. Use Freud’s derivation of the uncanny to analyze how the estate, with its hiding spaces and watchful portraits, devolves from a familiar and intimate home space to a grave – literally, during the climax in which the corpse of Judge Pyncheon lies in the living room, as though dozing, while being mocked by a procession of ancestral spirits.

2. Use Freud’s definition of repression to discuss how the sins of Colonel Pyncheon remain latent within the familial psyche for generations, as well as the terms by which they irrupt (one family member, Clifford, has been tormented near imbecility because of this repression). Connect to house as a physical structure – containment for which repression occurs.

3. Analyze the theme of mesmerism, a technique that recurs throughout the book in order to reveal secrets about the house’s history. Secrets revealed at moment that one is ‘out of one’s mind’; the self displaced from its physical embodiment (i.e. mesmerizer vacates will of the mesmerized, takes control). Sense that characters similarly need to vacate physical structure of home to be released from their past, which is what happens in the end.

Theoretical and methodological assumptions:

1. A psychological state can be expressed with concrete idioms, such as a house

2. That psychological conditions can take on physical symptoms, such as imbecility

Annotated Bibliography:

Crews, Frederick C. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Tatar, Maria M. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 1981), pp. 167-182.

Trachtenberg, Alan. “Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne's Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables.” American Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 460-481.