THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES: HAWTHORNE'S MODERN NOVEL OF 1848.

This article presents criticisms on the book The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book seems to be written with that concern for contemporaneity in mind. In the preface, Hawthorne simultaneously admitted and denied a connexion between his fiction and the modern situation. The novel is, he says, an " attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very Present that is flitting away from us," but he goes on to deplore any attempt to give the action a local habitation and a name. He has to admit that there is an essential historical connexion but he seems to be trying to distance his story from that connexion as much as possible. The preface is a mixture of revelation and mystification, for Hawthorne has exposed the text to the criticism he claims to fear by giving himself at least some of the problems that confront one kind of realist, virtually insisting time and again on risking the positive contact he says he wishes to avoid. He writes at the least in very close parallel with history.