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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is regarded as one of the most representative “romances” of the American literary tradition. While scholars have offered diverse interpretations in terms of the text’s traits as a romance, they have exhibited a surprisingly persistent consensus on the dramatic function of one of the main characters, Clifford Pyncheon. Due to his inactive and passive appearance, Clifford has been considered as a static figure of the long-gone past so helpless and impotent that it ought to rely on the present for its subsistence. Such consideration seems to emboss how different type of romance Hawthorne wrote in The Seven Gables, shifting its weight on the present in that typically past-centered genre, yet simultaneously establishes the narrow binary oppositional view of the past and the present. Rejecting that view, this essay argues that Clifford has an agency of his own in changing and transforming his state of being through his active pursuit of the interaction with the present. The argument ultimately calls for a reappraisal of Hawthorne’s achievement as a romancer that allows more dynamic relationships between the past and the present and paves grounds for more diverse visions of the future.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, Clifford Pyncheon, romance, Hawthorne studies, American literary studies
