Seven ways of reading : the House of the Seven Gables

Abstract

The House of the Seven Gables is the name given to a house in Salem, MA, constructed in 1668, that now, arguably, has seven gables. It would seem logical to assume that the book written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851, titled with the same name, would be about this house. However, the timeline of these namings is backwards, and the writer strictly denied the relation, instead likening the house of the story to a "castle in the air": a haunted, fantastical construction and metaphorical container for the moments of crisis when history repeats itself. The setting for a ghost story. In other words, it shouldn't be read into as a real thing. Of course, this denial can't be taken too literally. The property on Turner Street was indeed once owned by a cousin of Hawthorne's, and his time spent playing cards with her in the parlor is well documented. As it stands, the house in Salem is a historic landmark, revered both as a figment of literary mythology, and as one of the oldest and largest intact examples of colonial architecture in the former Massachusetts Bay Colony. As such, it stands obliquely for over 350 years of American history and national identity, both in its physicality and in Hawthorne's portrayal. Through the practice of close reading, this thesis designs a set of ways of apprehending the house as a living document, which like a text, can be read to hold a multiplicity of associated social and political meanings in its constructive details, its structural syntax, its contents and their stylings, and its siting. The method is in the repetitive act of representation in order to depict the house 'for what it is' by reenacting its intimations. Seven chapters, each refocusing the lens through which the house is imaged, set out to make visible the intersecting narratives latent in its architecture. My aim is not to resolve complexities, redundancies, or the stubbornness of the present architectural articulation, rather to elucidate their sources and implications: the vestigial ghosts of an alternate set of hauntings.