Abstract
In The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the symbol of mesmerism in varied and often contradictory ways not only as a lens for examining the shifting connotations of the pseudoscience but also as a way of interrogating and, at times, reconfiguring gender roles and social hierarchies within the nineteenth-century. Using a variety of primary and secondary source materials as the basis of a nuanced analysis of mesmerism within Hawthorne’s texts, this thesis contends that Hawthorne ultimately uses the pseudoscience not only as a site of reflection and re-envisioning of the concepts of masculinity and female agency, but also problemizes the availability of truth not only to the author figure, but to the reader and society as a whole.