Flip This House: Caroline Emmerton’s Activist Hermeneutics and The House of the Seven Gables

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association and its founder, Caroline Emmerton, are surprisingly iconoclastic reinterpreters of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Drawing on evidence from Emmerton’s archives at the House Museum and the reprinting history of The House of the Seven Gables, Mitchell Edwards recovers Emmerton’s work as a literary critic and documents the museum’s role as a forum for public criticism. To make a place for Hawthorne in the settlement movement of the early twentieth century, Emmerton puts the author to political work in service of her vision of the “sociological” value of the novel as a genre—even as such a move destabilizes Hawthorne’s authoritative categorization of his work as a romance. The article finally suggests that Emmerton’s activist hermeneutics—a genre of engaged interpretation outside the structures of professional criticism—anticipates trends toward political relevance in American criticism both near to her time and our own.