Crossing Thresholds in The House of the Seven Gables : Hawthorne’s Narrative Architecture and the Encounter with History

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.