1. This notion of reparation is characteristic of Hawthorne's response to his own novels and – also characteristically – cuts in two directions: the friendliness of The House produces the desire to write something with “an extra touch of the devil” in it and the bitterness of The Blithedale Romance in turn produces the intention to be more “genial” the next time out. See The Letters, 1843–1853, Centenary edition (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), vol. 16, pp. 312, 421–22, 462, 604Google Scholar. Throughout the essay, I cite the Penguin Classics edition of The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Stern, Milton R. (New York: Penguin Books, 1986)Google Scholar, which reproduces the text and pagination of vol. 2 of the Centenary edition.

2. Gilmore, Michael T., American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), ch. 5Google Scholar; and Michaels, Walter Benn, “Romance and Real Estate,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Michaels, and Pease, Donald E. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Other important attempts to place the book ideologically include Dauber, Kenneth, Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Bell, Michael Davitt, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Two writers on Hawthorne who seem to me to see the scope of his designs upon American culture are Brook Thomas and Donald Pease. See Thomas's argument that Hawthorne's romance demystifies cultural authority, revealing it to be a product of historical – and thus revisable – choices rather than “natural” (“The House of the Seven Gables: Reading the Romance of America,” PMLA 97 (1982): 195–211Google Scholar). See also his reworking of that essay, which connects the book to the history of property law, chs. 2 and 3 of Cross-examinations of Law and Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Though Pease's chapters on Hawthorne in Visionary Compacts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar do not include a reading of The House, his sense of Hawthorne as engaged in the rescue and reconstruction of communal connection is congenial to the detailed account of the book that I will be offering. Kenneth Dauber's original way of seeing The House of the Seven Gables - as above all an attempt to achieve intimate connection to a community of readers — has been valuable to me, though he pays the odd and unacceptable price of denying Hawthorne any specific ideas about the culture that he is connecting to or any investment in the content of his work. My sense of the specificity and force of Hawthorne's engagement with his readers depends to a great extent upon the description of middle-class culture that has emerged from the work of historians of “woman's sphere,” and on the account of writing by women offered by literary scholars like Nina Baym and Jane P. Tompkins, whose notion of “cultural work” illuminates Hawthorne's work as well as that of the writers the traditional canon of American literature has displaced.

3. Byam, Nina, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), passim, esp. chs. 8–11.Google Scholar

4. Kenneth Dauber interestingly suggests that the Preface fixes and contains any hostility that Hawthorne feels toward the community, thus preserving the novel proper for the establishment of intimacy between him and his readers (Rediscovering Hawthorne, pp. 122–24).Google Scholar

5. Miller, J. Hillis, “The Narrator as General Consciousness,” esp. pp. 62–88Google Scholar, in The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).Google Scholar

6. Brodhead, Richard, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 72.Google Scholar

7. For a valuable account of Hawthorne's insistence on Hepzibah's social representativeness, see Brodhead, , Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel, pp. 74–75.Google Scholar

8. The great theorists of this way of thinking about voice within novels is M. M. Bakhtin. In “Discourse in the Novel,” he argues that the novel as a genre is defined by its permeability to a culture's different voices and by the competition or “dialogue” between them. The novelist is thus to be regarded as a deployer of these voices. See The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422Google Scholar. One implication of my argument is that Hawthorne, in composing this version of romance, had to do precisely the kind of theorizing about the novel that Bakhtin has made available to us.

9. Let me be clear about the way I am using two terms that will recur in this essay. The first is “ideology.” My thinking about ideology has been shaped by Geertz, Clifford's important essay, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 193–233Google Scholar. Geertz argues that our understanding of what ideology is has been held back by two insufficiently sophisticated theories: that ideology is a mask for the operation of the interests of particular social or political groups; and that ideological expressions, from myths to political rhetoric, are reducible to symptoms of particular kinds of anxiety or “strain” within a culture. Geertz observes that “the extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man's innate response capacities” means that culture rather than genetic templates is the primary organizer of patterns of human behavior and that we create ourselves through our capacity to construct symbolic fields in which to act: “The tool-making, laughing, or lying animal, man is also the incomplete - or, more accurately, self-completing – animal. The agent of his own realization, he creates out of his general capacity for the construction of symbolic models the specific capabilities that define him.” “Ideology,” then, means all of the strategies and structures of meaning-making that belong to a particular culture: “It is … the attempt of ideologies to render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them, that accounts both for the ideologies' highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held.…Whatever else ideologies may be - projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, phatic expressions of group solidarity - they are, most distinctively, maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience” (pp. 217–20). I think just such a capacious understanding of the cultural activity of meaning-making is at work in Hawthorne's narrative strategy in The House. For a lucid account of the value of Geertz's work for students of American literature and culture, see Gunn, Giles, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 5.Google Scholar

I will be using “central” and “centrality” to refer to the place figuratively occupied by the values and understandings that comprise the moral consensus that holds together a particular community. I have chosen that term because of Hawthorne's tendency - in this book, throughout his work, and in describing his own cultural role - to imagine society in terms of the dominant values that hold cultural authority and occupy its central spaces, and the marginal perspectives that define its ethical borders and occupy its spatial outskirts.

10. I have borrowed this useful characterization of rural economic life from Jack Larkin, “The Merriams of Brookfield: Printing in the Economy and Culture of Rural Massachusetts in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 96, Part 1. (04 1986): 39–73Google Scholar. Larkin writes that “economic life was concrete, face-to-face, and inextricably entwined with family ties, everyday social interactions, and community relationships” (p. 42). Larkin demonstrates that this rural economy was itself changing in complex ways in response to the emergence of a larger-scale, urban-centered market economy. I was directed to this essay by Stephen Nissenbaum, to whom I am more generally indebted for an understanding of the ways in which the material conditions of its making and selling have shaped antebellum literature.

11. Thanks to important work in women's history, the elements of this domestic ideology are now familiar to present-day readers. Classic texts in this historical recovery include Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” in A Heritage of her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Cott, Nancy F. and Pleck, Elizabeth H. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979)Google Scholar; Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. It is crucial to remember that the emphasis on sympathy and moral influence as a form of power links “woman's sphere” to a larger “sentimental” consensus that included men, especially male fiction writers, interested in a model for human connection, social power, and ethical authority that countered the values and methods of the marketplace. I am indebted for this point to the work of Fraden, Rena, “The Sentimental Tradition in Dickens and Hawthorne,” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1983)Google Scholar, ch. 1. For a useful account of sentimentality as an intellectual tradition, see Kaplan, Fred, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), Introduction and ch. 1.Google Scholar

12. See The Letters, 1813–1843 (Centenary edition), vol. 15, pp. 291, 299, 337, and esp. p. 494.Google Scholar

13. For a description of this kind of fiction, see Baym, , Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, pp. 201–7.Google Scholar

14. On the sentimental topos of the inadequacy of language to feeling see Starr, G. A., “‘Only a boy’: Notes on Sentimental Novels,” Genre 10 (Winter 1977): 501–27Google Scholar, cited in Fraden, , “The Sentimental Tradition,” p. 14.Google Scholar

15. In his portrait of Clifford as an artist whose claims to special treatment come at the cost of his capacity to wield power, Hawthorne is anticipating later analysts of the social role of the artist in 19th-century culture. See Williams, Raymond's chapter on “The Romantic Artist” in Culture and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1958)Google Scholar; and Ann Douglas's account of the perpetual childhood of the sentimental sketch writers in The Feminization of American Culture, pp. 237–41.Google Scholar

16. Michael Gilmore identifies this “seer” as the marginal, unmarketable Hawthornian artist, in American Romanticism and the Marketplace, p. 104.Google Scholar

17. Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), ch. 1.Google Scholar

18. On Holgrave as a figure of fertility, sexuality, and the joyful expenditure of energy, see Baym, Nina, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

19. On the culture force of the rhetoric of “head” and “heart” and the special association of the heart with women and the domestic sphere, see Cott, , The Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 160–68.Google Scholar

20. The most interesting discussion that I have found of the limitations of Holgrave's radicalism and of the contemporary significance of Hawthorne's depiction of his character is Forgie, George's in Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 115–21Google Scholar. Forgie argues that Holgrave's anxiety-ridden, ultimately self-regarding politics is typical of the way in which private anxiety infiltrated political consciousness in the generation that had to follow the act of the founding fathers: “When domesticity proves such a solvent to radicalism…, radicalism is revealed at once as purely personal and emotional in nature. It is not that Holgrave ceases to be a prophet of social revolution. He demonstrates that he never was one” (p. 121).

21. For an illuminating discussion of the explanatory function of the book's romance elements, see Brodhead, Richard's discussion of “Alice Pyncheon” in Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel, pp. 84–86.Google Scholar

22. This is the center of my disagreement with Walter Benn Michaels's argument that Hawthorne is engaged in The House of the Seven Gables in imagining a safely absolute claim to an inviolable selfhood. I am arguing that Hawthorne is instead demonstrating the impossibility - and the undesirability - of such a form of self-possession, and seeking to discipline the predatory urge to possess others that seems to be a response to the absence of such sovereignty over the self. The conception of selfhood being explored in “Alice Pyncheon” similarly calls into doubt Michael Gilmore's version of Hawthorne's attitudes toward the marketplace, for while he repudiates the urge to own or control others, the notion of selfrisking exchange has clear affinities with other kinds of marketplace activities.

23. Holgrave's actual language is extraordinarily elusive — a stone exterior would give an “impression of permanence … essential to the happiness of any one moment” (italics added) (pp. 314–15) — and in its metaphysical openness hardly amounts to a very solid conservatism. Given the emphasis on transforming the reader in 19th-century accounts of the effects and purposes of fiction, it is important not to discount the political force of a character-centered theory of reform. This point is lucidly argued in Fraden, , “The Sentimental Tradition,” pp. 11–12Google Scholar. For a valuable discussion of the political dimension of Hawthorne's work, see Donald Pease's argument that he is engaged, throughout his work, in the reconstruction of communal connection through the recovery of a relation to history more complex and sustaining than that provided by the prevailing revolutionary ethos (Visionary Compacts, chs. 2 and 3).