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Framing The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Framing The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Historical Context. 1830: The Indian Removal Act (Trail of Tears) 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion 1832: The Black Hawk War 1835: The Second Seminole War 1833: Slavery abolished in Britain

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Framing The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

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  1. Framing The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

  2. Historical Context • 1830: The Indian Removal Act (Trail of Tears) • 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion • 1832: The Black Hawk War • 1835: The Second Seminole War • 1833: Slavery abolished in Britain • 1846: U.S. War with Mexico (annexation of Texas and California) • 1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo • 1851: Land Law of 1851 essentially overturns the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

  3. Literary Context • 1815: Frankenstein (Shelley) • 1845: The Raven (Poe) • 1851: Moby Dick (Melville) • 1852: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) • 1855: Leaves of Grass (Whitman) • 1859: The Origin of Species (Darwin) • 1899: The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)

  4. Interpretative Inroads 1: The Work the House Does • Embodies family’s physical presence in society; enacts generational influence; preserves family’s “fortune” • Greed for property motivates original crime • Colonel Pyncheon’s status facilitates the expropriation of Maule’s property; property begets property • Passage on p. 18 – 19, beginning “Matthew Maule, on the other hand…”; consider Maule as metonymy for earlier and more primal American land-grab

  5. The Work the House Does, Cont’d • The house appears to be haunted; the past imposes itself on the present through the house’s structure • The “haunting” (which appears in the present-day narrative as an ongoing fixation with the family’s past, unfixed fortunes) introduces temporal disruptions, instabilities, and uncertainty • The uncertain temporality of the narrative opens the question of reparations: to what extent is a descendant responsible for the crimes of an ancestor? • Passages on p. 14 & 16 first raise the question of reparation; connect this question to other forms of reparation of concern during Hawthorne’s historical moment

  6. Interpretive Inroads 2: Reflecting on Representation • Representation as a reflection of inner truths? Holgrave’s daguerreotypes and the portrait of Pyncheon seem instantiations of the mirror reputed to have been placed in the house by Maule’s son • Hawthorne’s prose as pictorially descriptive but also highly self-conscious and self-consciously unreliable • Passage on p. 14 • The unreliable narrator and issues of genre: turn to the Introduction, consider the use or purposes of representation

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