The House of the Seven Gables

The House of the Seven Gables is part of the broader artistic/literary tradition of Romanticism. The Romantic tradition began in Europe in the late 18th century as a response to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and rationality, with traditional Romanticism valuing the emotional and intuitive as alternative sources of knowledge. “Dark” Romanticism was a subset of Romanticism focusing on that which is unknown or unknowable. Dark Romantic characters often exist in a state of confusion, with neither reason nor emotion guiding them in making sense of their world.

This confusion is more broadly reflected in narrative attention to the experiences of those who are outcasts from society, whether they are social outcasts such as the poor, the criminal, the hermit, or those resisting gender conventions, or those outcast as a result of their hybrid nature (e.g., werewolves, vampires, ghosts, etc.). The confusion experienced by characters and/or the narrator is also intended to confuse the reader, who may be unable to make meaning or “sense” out of what is in front of them.

The House of the Seven Gables has many of these hallmarks of Dark Romanticism, though its “darkness” is often more grey than black. The house itself functions as a space that seems to support the dead rather than the living and where the security that a home is supposed to offer is replaced with paranoia and discomfort for its living inhabitants. Hawthorne employs the conventions of Dark Romanticism, such as the motif of the haunted house, to highlight the very real familial violence of the past that enabled the Pyncheon family to secure the house that now “haunts” them. The horror of the story is ultimately not supernatural but natural, and the conclusion dramatically softens the novel’s gothic qualities by moving the story out of any darkness entirely—a conclusion that many scholars have argued is not supported by the rest of the novel.