Haunted Houses: The House of the Seven Gables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin : The Second Annual House of the Seven Gables Lecture, Salem, MA, May 25, 2025

ABSTRACT

In this 2025 lecture, Robert S. Levine brought together Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe to consider how they addressed slavery and race during the 1850s. Specifically, Levine uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin to tease out aspects of Hawthorne’s thinking about slavery and race in The House of the Seven Gables. In a broader sense, Levine is interested in how both Hawthorne and Stowe made use of haunted houses to explore the haunted and divided house that was the antebellum United States.