¹ Unless otherwise indicated, page references to The House of the Seven Gables are cited from The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, Claude M. Simpson (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965). Other texts cited from this edition are The Scarlet Letter (SL), The Blithedale Romance (BR), The Marble Faun (MF), and Mosses from an Old Manse (OM).

² See, of course, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957). See also Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1957), pp. 12–13.

³ See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 137–45.

⁴ Terance Martin, in The Instructed Vision (Bloo mington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 136–45, argues that the romance reacts against the assumptions of the Scottish Common Sense School—the assumptions that ruled American thinking. Henry Nash Smith, in Democracy and the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), argues that Hawthorne's romances subvert the “established value system” of his reading public (p. 22). I agree, but I believe that the subversion is much more extensive than Smith admits. Milton R. Stern, in “American Values and Romantic Fiction,” in American Fiction, ed. James Nagel (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1977), argues that “Romantic fiction is created by recoil from assumptions inherent in the American self-image” (p. 32). But Stern falls prey to a nature-versus-humanity opposition that forgets a middle ground of history and concludes that the only alternative for Hawthorne and others is “philosophical conservatism.”

⁵ Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (London: New Left Books, 1967), p. 32. Adorno's disagreement with Lukâcs about the political implications of realistic fiction anticipates my own disagreement with Myra Jehlen and her assessment of the relation between American fiction and the ideology of the middle class. (See her “New World Epics: The Novel and the Middle Class in America.” Salmagundi, 36 [1977], 49–68.) While I consider the romance a form that can suggest alternatives to American society, Jehlen, who relies on Lukâcs, claims that nineteenthcentury American writers serve the middle-class ideology by “accepting the status quo as simply natural” (p. 60). For her the European novel, in contrast to the American romance, “more easily envisages alternative societies or at least their theoretical possibilities. Other systems than the contemporary are not there so literally unthinkable” (p. 51). I do not want to minimize our differences, but I do think it is important to point out that the political stance of neither the “realistic” novel nor the “romance” novel can be decided on purely formalistic grounds. As Hawthorne was fully aware, romances and novels are read differently in European and American settings. Here is his description of how the romance is read: In the old countries, with which Fiction has long been conversant, a certain conventional privilege seems to be awarded to the romancer; his work is not put exactly side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to every-day Probability, in view of the improved effects which he is bound to produce thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no such Faery Land, so like the real world, that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This atmosphere is what the American romancer needs. (BR, p. 2) Hawthorne's view supports my argument that the way in which fictional works are read is of the utmost importance and that ways of reading are culturally conditioned.

⁶ See Leo Bersani, “The Subject of Power,” Diacritics,7 (Fall 1977), 7. See also Salmagundi, 42 (1978), a special issue entitled The Politics of Anti-Realism.

⁷ Lionel Trilling, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking, 1950), p. 212. See Nicolaus Mills's attack on Trilling in American and English Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973).

⁸ A. N. Kaul, The American Vision (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 5. See Mills's discussion of Kaul, pp. 129–38. See also Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).

⁹ Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961). See also Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), esp. “Epilogue: The Symbol of America,” pp. 176–210.

¹⁰ Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966). Poirier's excellent study loses power because, in a typical American distrust of forms and categories, he avoids labeling works as romance or novel and prefers instead to study “style.” But, as I argue, the terms are important in understanding how Hawthorne conceived of his work and of American society.

¹¹ Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), p. 177.

¹² My argument suggests the need of adding a social component to recent studies of the romance that emphasize its self-consciousness as a genre. For instance, I would agree with Joel Porte that “The American romance is characterized by a need self-consciously to define its own aims, so that ‘romance’ becomes frequently the theme as well as the form of these authors' works” (The Romance in America [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969], p. x). I would add, however, that a literary work, like any other human product, is produced in a particular social context and that what makes a literary text different from other commodities is that it speaks both to and about the conditions of its own production. In self-consciously exploring the form of the romance, American writers inevitably speak to and about the conditions that caused the romance to develop in America. Since I completed this essay, Michael Davitt Bell has published in part the sort of study that I call for, an attempt to understand “in sociological terms” what it meant to “ ‘be a romancer’ in nineteenth-century America.” My complaint with Bell's work is that it is not really social history but a form of intellectual history. Nevertheless, I agree with his comment that “Hawthorne and Melville recognized that, like the romance, the new nation required the embodiment of strange new truths in forms—forms of behavior and belief, of character and institution, of literary fiction. In such a view, all visible culture seemed a kind of fictional language, a species of romance, a fabric of artificial formalism uneasily concealing the anarchic energy that had produced it” (The Development of American Romance [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980], pp. xiii-xiv).

¹³ The tragedy of mass culture, Max Horkheimer writes, is that “Man has lost his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives. This other world was that of art” (“Art and Mass Culture,” in Critical Theory [New York: Herder, 1972], p. 278).

¹⁴ Seymour L. Gross, ed., The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 5–6.

¹⁵ There seem to be “harbingers abroad” moving toward reading Hawthorne and American fiction as I suggest: recognizing the rhetorical component of society and the social component of rhetoric. Bercovitch writes of a move from “history to rhetoric” that indicates “the importance of ideology (in the Marxist sense) in the shaping of the United States” (The Puritan Origins,p. 186). Bercovitch attempts this study in The American Jeremiad. While he focuses on “the affirmative energies” of the jeremiad, he notes that “to describe those energies is not the same thing as to endorse them” (p. xv). See esp. the discussion of Hawthorne that concludes the book (pp. 205–10). See also Jonathan Arac, “Reading the Letter,” Diacritics. 9 (Summer 1979). 42–52.

¹⁶ In his Preface to The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne once again calls attention to the mixture of the romantic and the ordinary in American life. While he urges us to read his book as a pure romance and not as a history of his experiences at Brook Farm, he also notes that his stay at Brook Farm was “the most romantic episode of his own life—essentially a daydream, and yet a fact—and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality” (BR, p. 2).

¹⁷ Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1947), p. 328.

¹⁸ John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1690), Sec. 85; quoted in Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion's Fatal Tree, ed. Hay et al. (London: Allen Lane, 1975), p. 18. Edward Christian, ed., Commentaries on the Laws of England, by William Blackstone, 12th ed. (1793–95), ii, 2; quoted in Hay, p. 19.

¹⁹ Rudolph Von Abele, The Death of the Artist: A Study of Hawthorne's Disintegration (The Hague: Martimis Nijhoff, 1955), p. 66.

²⁰ Barthes remarks, “The bourgeois class has precisely built its power on technical, scientific progress, on an unlimited transformation of nature: bourgeois ideology yields in return an unchangeable nature” (Mythologies,pp. 141–42). See also C. P. Macpherson on the philosophical foundation of political systems “where everything is free to the hand that can grasp it” (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962]).

²¹ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 265.

²² Roy Harvey Pearce, “Romance and the Study of History,” in Hawthorne Centenary Essays, ed. Pearce (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1964), p. 225.

²³ Paul de Man, “Political Allegory in Rousseau,” Critical Inquiry, 2, No. 4 (1976), 663.

²⁴ See Jonathan Culler, “On Trope and Persuasion,” New Literary History, 9 (Spring 1978), 608.

²⁵ For an exploration of Hawthorne's relation to his audience see Michael T. Gilmore, “The Artist and the Marketplace in The House of the Seven Gables,” ELH, 48 (Spring 1981), 172–89.

²⁶ F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 332.

²⁷ John Gatta, Jr., “Progress and Providence in The House of the Seven Gables,” American Literature, 50 (March 1978), 47–48.

²⁸ X Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 187.

²⁹ Edgar F. Dryden, “Hawthorne's Castle in the Air: Form and Theme in The House of the Seven Gables,” ELH, 38 (June 1971), 294–317. Dryden's essay is excellent in showing how the form of the romance can lead to social isolation.

³⁰ Kenneth Daubner, in “The American Culture as Genre,” Criticism, 21 (Spring 1980), talks of authority by consent as a rhetorical strategy in American fiction and society. He claims that “A study of America as reading and writing is a profoundly demystifying project” (p. 106). On Hawthorne he writes, “Society, Hawthorne's career seems to say. is never what is given, but is always what is made” (p. 110).

³¹ Arac comments, “Hawthorne's constant authorial fretting refuses to yield a fetishized, objective product. It continues instead to show the human activity that, as Marx insisted, must be recognized if we are not to mystify our world and seem to place it beyond the powers of human intervention” (p. 49). Arac seems to imply, however, that the critic's task is to ensure that the vision will not be turned into an object by deferring an interpretation. But such an approach is ahistorical. Critics are within history; their actions are to interpret according to present historical circumstances.

³² Lawrence Sargent Hall, Hawthorne: Critic of Society (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1944), p. 160.

³³ In The American Jeremiad Bercovitch shows how the rhetoric of the jeremiad allowed Americans to enforce conformity and conservatism by appealing to the logic of “continuing revolution.” See esp. “Ritual of Consensus,” pp. 132–75. See also Jehlen: “Indeed even those who have taken class struggles in this country seriously have usually shared in the millennial vision. As C. Vann Woodward observed, much of the persuasiveness of Southern populism, for example, derived from its claims to more truly represent the real America” (p. 52).

³⁴ Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 264.

³⁵ I should like to thank the Alexander Von Humboldt Stiftung of the Federal Republic of Germany for its support while I was preparing this essay.