Hawthorne's House of Three Stories

Abstract

IN its best moments, Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction reveals an astonishing duality of mind, a broad awareness that is generally discussed only by halves. In recent years strong evidence has been gathered to show that Hawthorne was a deep questioner of the nature of fiction itself, that he was given to self-conscious puzzling over the problems of being understood, over the impreciseness of language and the pitfalls of communicating by means of stories, over the whole anomalous art of seeking and imparting truth by telling tales.1 On the other side of a standing disagreement is the Hawthorne of old, the author who writes not to himself about fiction but directly to an American audience and who engages those social and moral issues that for a century have been taken as Hawthorne's essence: stasis and change, the past and the present, sin and retribution-problems that show up everywhere in the fiction and that no new wave of reinterpretation can or should displace. My position, and what I hope to demonstrate here, is that these two apparently opposite Hawthornes can in fact be one. As his readers, we are not faced with an either-or choice of accepting one idea of his achievement and rejecting the other; rather, in at least some of the major works, the older Hawthorne, the familiar moralist and social observer, reconciles himself elegantly with that self-reflexive writer who supposedly questions the validity of his own art. The House of the Seven Gables is my case in point. In a real sense, the novel does show itself to be about fiction, about the very paradox of telling stories for high-serious reasons, but it