Abstract
The titular “House” from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 work The House of the Seven Gables is not just one house: it is an old edifice where the characters live, an intertwined family “house” of the Pyncheons and Maules, the plants and animals who live there alongside the humans, the real-world House that stands in Salem to this day, and the land, air, and sea that indelibly unite the man-made structure with a planetary environment via a specific region of physical, mental, cultural, meteorological, and historical space. I argue that through various aspects of his representations of the environment in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne demonstrates the doubled qualities of environments as natural–cultural phenomena, as haunted and haunting remembrances of violations against humans and nature, and as necessarily symbolic objects that yet can be read in ways that inform us of and create their non-symbolic realities. By reading Hawthorne with an eye to Lawrence Buell’s “place-sense,” I find a place for Hawthorne’s overdue introduction to contemporary ecocritical studies that positions him in dialogue with the scientific framework, eminent in his time, of Alexander von Humboldt, opening a new avenue for literary–scientific analyses of nineteenth-century American literature; I argue for an ecogothic sense of Hawthorne’s environments that demonstrates the inherent flaws in historical, legal, and cultural erasures of Native Americans and the land where they live through the haunting presence of diegetic doubles: cultural artifacts that stand in for real people and environments such as daguerreotypes, portraits, maps, and deeds; and I argue that these, and other such failed attempts to collapse nature into simple symbols, lead us to Hawthorne’s Lacan-adjacent sense of the relation between symbolic and real environments, where we make sense of planetary realities and individual crises of scale through an understanding that all human interpretation of the environment is symbolic, flawed, and yet still meaningfully real. By filling an ecocritical gap in Hawthorne studies, I foreground the opportunities to reexamine representations of the environment throughout American literature considering nature’s difference from and dependence upon human conceptions of the environment: an eco-regional relation that is always imperfect, sometimes horrific, and stronger when we accept that humanity’s existence needs a whole planet just as all storms need the sea.