The House of the Seven Gables : une tragédie gothique

Abstract

Although Hawthorne himself chose it in the preface to describe The House of the Seven Gables, paving the way for almost universal critical usage, the word «romance» fails to convey the gloomy atmosphere of the book. Going back to Aristotle's Poetics but also drawing from recent critical assessments, this article purports to demonstrate that the text is informed by a tragic vision. Through the staging of a hereditary malediction in a gothic house that brings together xviith-century opportunistic fanaticism and contemporary greed and hypocrisy, and in spite of too conspicuously comic an ending, the writer expresses a conception of time and fate much akin to the spirit of Greek tragedy — a conception that entails a dialectics of fate and individual freedom.