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The work aims to review Hawthorne’s Irony through studying various ambivalence in The House of the Seven Gables, especially focusing on Clifford's altered state of consciousness.
In the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne famously distinguishes between romance and the novel, also claims that his narrative is a romance in “its attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very Present that is flitting away from us.” Hawthorne’s romance is taken to be integrative mode seeking to reconcile self and other, past and present, spirit and matter, actual and imaginary. By this ambivalence, his romances are full of various ironies of fine intelligence and sensibility. Clifford is an ambivalent figure in the site of considerable anxiety and altered state of consciousness in The House of the Seven Gables. At one point in the novel, Clifford in the crowd of a political procession passes, is immersed in the surging stream of
human sympathies. But after discovering Jaffrey dead in the study, Clifford and Hepzibah
fly from the House of the Seven Gables boarding a train. The train is a figure for their displacement. The writing of romance takes place in a kind of altered state of consciousness, analogous to mesmerism.
As a final irony, Holgrave’s daguerreotype of the dead Judge serves, because of it’s presumed minute fidelity, as evidence not only in the case of Jaffrey’s sudden death, but also that of the earlier death of his uncle, which it is assumed to repeat. The ambivalence and the irony in Hawthorne’s romance is linked with the discrepancies between the idealism and the reality in American society.