Breaking the Spell of Past Misdeeds
A Hauntological Reading of The House of the Seven Gables
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6188063 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Justyna Fruzińska (0000-0001-6368-5746, University of Lodz, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-12 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/ejas.20585 |
| OpenAlex | W4386787432 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is a text about haunting on many levels: Hawthorne himself is haunted by his family history and by the literary influence of British gothic; the house is haunted by literal ghosts, signaling the unresolved nature of past events; the novel’s characters are haunted by the family history and their own unfulfilled futures. The book is also haunted by the Pyncheon nostalgia for the old aristocratic order, as well as by capitalist exploitation of racial and class others. This paper uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to explore those different facets of the ghostly. As a result, the reading of Gables’ ghosts reveals a tension at the heart of the novel between a pessimistic and an optimistic reading of human life and how much it is determined by the past
Art · Linguistics · Literature · Order (exchange · Reading (process · Spell · History · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|