The House of the Seven Gables

Hawthorne’s brief preface presents The House of the Seven Gables as a “Romance” and not a novel. By “novel” Hawthorne is not referring to a modern definition of the novel but, rather, writing that attempts to represent experience “realistically.” Hawthorne is more interested in the reality of the human heart, which requires artistic license to be represented. Thus, The House of the Seven Gables will rely on creative representations in which the writer may “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture” (1). Another reason Hawthorne insists that his text is a Romance is because it connects the past with the present; how to interpret this connection will be left up to the reader.

The Romance has a moral—“the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones” (2)—but Hawthorne does not want to “impale the story with its moral” (2), either, as this is not effective. Finally, he asserts that the story has “more to do with the clouds overhead, than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex” (3).