"Within small compass": Hawthorne's Expansive Urban Garden in &lt;i&gt;The House of the Seven Gables&lt;/i&gt;

The first members of the Pyncheon family Nathaniel Hawthorne names in The House of the Seven Gables include no humans, but “the old Pyncheon-house” and “the Pyncheon-elm” (5). I argue that Hawthorne’s representation of nature produces a cultural–natural place-sense in which environment acts both as cultural symbol and endemic nature separate from human conceptions. By reading Hawthorne via Lawrence Buell’s “place-sense,” I argue for doubled existences of Hawthorne’s environment and position Hawthorne in dialogue with Alexander von Humboldt. Hawthorne’s depiction of nature that displays the “external world and our ideas and feelings melt[ing] into each other” both demonstrates a Humboldtian response to a common division between pre reason and experience in natural philosophy up through the nineteenth-century and also resonates with Donna Haraway’s call for “ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with” that defy preexisting anthropocentric models (Humboldt 1:64; Trouble 55). This consideration of Hawthorne alongside Humboldt invites interplay between nineteenth-century American literature and nascent nineteenth-century ecological philosophies, reading both in a cultural–natural framework engaging across multiple disciplines and foregrounds the opportunities to reexamine representations of nature in American literature considering nature’s difference from and dependence upon cultural conceptions.

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“A kind of privilege to haunt”: Settler Structures, Land-Based Knowledge, and the Agency of the (Super)Natural inThe House of the Seven Gables

Scruton¹

2022

Nathaniel Hawthorne Review

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The House of the Seven Gables constantly seems, on the surface, to separate settler civilization from North American Nature, from the obsession with cultivating garden space to the fear of moral decay within white American homes and lineages. However, a closer look at the actions and presence of Nature in the novel reveals a complex network of agential beings that are not so controllable or conquerable. I argue that the novel’s spectral conflict is a material conflict between Nature and settler institutions, a conflict that ultimately undermines this binary opposition and reveals the presence and agency of nonhuman Nature in settlers’ lives. Anxieties over the (super)natural presence of ghosts and witchcraft in the novel reflect the reality that beings in the natural environment have massive, invisible influence on settler society despite attempts to erase both Natural spaces and Native presence and relationships to the land.

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"Within small compass": Hawthorne's Expansive Urban Garden in <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

Hawthorne and the City

Hawthorne and the City

A Somewhat Wilder Grace: Hawthorne, Humboldt, and Withstanding the Collapse of Nature into Symbol in The House of the Seven Gables

“A kind of privilege to haunt”: Settler Structures, Land-Based Knowledge, and the Agency of the (Super)Natural inThe House of the Seven Gables

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