ABSTRACT A conversation with Dakota Russell, Executive Director, Susan Baker, Curator of Collections from The House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association, and Charles Baraw, past president of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society.
ABSTRACT This article examines the formal significance of the threshold trope in The House of the Seven Gables. While readers and critics alike have long noted the threshold’s thematic importance to the story, Luke Woodard reads the architectural image as a metaphor for the novel’s narrative structure. Just as the novel’s characters are constantly stepping back and forth across the literal thresholds of the Pyncheon-house, Hawthorne employs a variety of unconventional narrative techniques to dramatize the reader’s crossing into the fictional world of his story. In doing so, Hawthorne recreates for his audience a similar process to what Clifford and Holgrave undergo over the course of the story, urging the reader to move beyond a binary conception of past and present. In the final section of the article, the author argues that the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association and Museum in Salem currently stands as both a result and continuation of Hawthorne’s narrative technique. Woodard’s approach sheds light on the extent to which the self-reflexive formal structures of Hawthorne’s fiction are connected to his work as a writer of historical romance.
ABSTRACT This article argues that the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association and its founder, Caroline Emmerton, are surprisingly iconoclastic reinterpreters of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Drawing on evidence from Emmerton’s archives at the House Museum and the reprinting history of The House of the Seven Gables, Mitchell Edwards recovers Emmerton’s work as a literary critic and documents the museum’s role as a forum for public criticism. To make a place for Hawthorne in the settlement movement of the early twentieth century, Emmerton puts the author to political work in service of her vision of the “sociological” value of the novel as a genre—even as such a move destabilizes Hawthorne’s authoritative categorization of his work as a romance. The article finally suggests that Emmerton’s activist hermeneutics—a genre of engaged interpretation outside the structures of professional criticism—anticipates trends toward political relevance in American criticism both near to her time and our own.
