The image of the house in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Authors:   , Anderson W. Steve 
Published: February 2025

Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes the image of the house in relation to a number of the thematic issues that are central to his work. The larger theme connected with the house is the search for home, but the search is a complex one that he pursues on several levels. Structurally, Hawthorne uses the house as a mediating point between thematic extremes; these dichotomized issues include wilderness-civilization, New World-Old World, present past, and creativity-convention. The house used in rela tion to these issues varies. The more prominent images include the cottage, the mansion, the Puritan meeting-house, and, what is but a part of the house, the room. Yet with each edifice, Hawthorne works toward the same end: to establish the house as a secure shelter against the destructive tensions of opposed value systems. If the opposed values are reconciled in the house, it becomes a home, a haven that protects man from the destructive tensions. If the values are not reconciled, the result is homelessness. Readily apparent is his concern with individuals who search for personal security in an often hostile universe. On a cultural level, he traces America's search for institutional stability. On yet another level, he follows the artist in his search for a house of the imagination that embodies balanced and viable aesthetic principles. Hawthorne attempts to establish in his fiction the ideal house, a "fixed point" that brings into harmonious alignment the values that the house represents and the exterior forces that are inimical to those values. We see in his fiction a desire for refuge from "desert places," and he posits the house as shelter against them. In a few qualified instances, he comes close to establishing the ideal house, but, try as he might, he could not finally reconcile the house with the forces that threaten from outside. Of course, he faced some formidable obstacles. He sought stability in a culture that was developing centrifugally; America was perpetually expanding outward, away from a fixed point. There is also the autobiographical problem. Often, the intensity of his alienation from his era reaches inordinate, if not pathological, extremes. Indeed, it often seems that he is as much in conflict with himself as with the world in which he lived. Significantly, an examination of the house imagery clarifies many of the issues that so plagued the man. In the first chapter, I discuss five stories that Hawthorne wrote in the earliest stage of his career. These stories, many or all of which were intended for inclusion in the Provincial Tales, treat the agonizing quest for a home in the New World wilderness. Hawthorne develops this theme largely in relation to the cottage and the Puritan meeting-house. The second chapter deals with the Old World New World theme, which Hawthorne presents in terms of the mansion. We see that the Old World hierarchy that the mansion embodies cannot provide order and stability for the New World culture. The stories and sketches treated in the third chapter illustrate Hawthorne's attempt to posit the house as a means of controlling and channelling the Promethean powers of the imagination. In the fourth chapter, I discuss his use of house imagery in the New England trilogy--The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance. Through the house imagery, he explores and analyzes the cultural crises of America's past, present, and future. The fifth chapter treats Hawthorne's confrontation with Europe, and his use of the house image in relation to the Old World-New World theme in The Marble Faun and two of the unfinished romances, "The Ancestral Footstep," and Doctor Grimshawe's Secret.