Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on
July 4, 1804, in Salem,
Massachusetts, to a family that had been prominent in the area since
colonial times. Hawthorne’s father died when he was only four years
old. At the age of fourteen, Hawthorne moved with his mother to
a lonely farm in Maine. He later attended Bowdoin College, graduating
in 1825. Hawthorne spent several years after
college writing, eventually self-publishing his first novel, Fanshawe, anonymously in 1828.
The novel was a failure, and by the late 1830s
Hawthorne was forced to support himself by working at the Boston
customhouse. Nevertheless, by the mid-1830s
Hawthorne had managed to become part of New England’s literary scene,
spending much of his time with the leaders of the influential Transcendentalist
movement. His circle of friends included Transcendentalist pioneer
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville. Hawthorne
lived at a time of restlessness and transition, and his writing
reflects American society on the move. The House of the
Seven Gables is filled with predictions of sweeping change,
particularly of a world made more mobile by trains and the telegraph.
A few of the characters even state that they see their world shifting
toward a more connected, mobile age.
In 1842 Hawthorne married Sophia
Peabody, a friend of Emerson and other Transcendentalist writers,
and the newlyweds settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne
resumed writing. In 1850 he published The
Scarlet Letter, which enjoyed critical acclaim and became
an instant commercial success. The House of the Seven Gables appeared
the following year and fared even better—its initial sales exceeded
even those of The Scarlet Letter. Ultimately, however, The
House of the Seven Gables proved less popular with both
readers and critics. Nonetheless, the two books together made Hawthorne
a wealthy man.
The Transcendentalists were nonconformists who placed
great faith in the capacity of human thought. They believed spirituality existed
most profoundly in nature and reason. The Scarlet Letter is considered
one of the leading literary works of the Transcendentalist age.
Yet Hawthorne was not a devoted follower of Transcendentalism, and
he had difficulties with the movement’s optimism and idealism. Compared
with Melville’s Moby-Dick and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, one
of the works that defined Transcendentalism, Hawthorne’s work seems
closer to the American Gothic movement of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century.
The Gothic genre preoccupied itself primarily with dark
brooding themes of romance, passion, and human fallibility. A mildly
cynical and pessimistic view of human nature pervades Hawthorne’s novels,
and he frequently explores human flaws like hypocrisy and immorality. The
Scarlet Letter, for example, has an adulterous preacher
as one of its main characters, and the Pyncheon family at the center
of The House of the Seven Gables holds many dark, deadly
secrets, despite their social prominence. The novel also boldly
blends realism and fantasy. Hawthorne himself called The House
of the Seven Gables a romance, arguing that romances were not
bound by the ordinary course of human experience.
