The Death of Anti-Whiggery in The House of the Seven Gables

Literary critics have often considered the US party politics of Nathaniel Hawthorne's day when they have assessed the broader ideological implications of both The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Yet scholars depart in how they view the relationship between each novel and the party system. The Scarlet Letter, set in an era before the nation—let alone political parties—existed, has been interpreted variously as an intervention into the substantive points of dispute or consensus as the Second Party system (Whigs vs. Democrats) approached its end.¹ The historical novel, counterintuitively, has seemed to illuminate more clearly the fundamental political tensions of Hawthorne's own period than The House of the Seven Gables, which the author set more or less in the present ("not very remote from the present day"²). Because its villain is a scheming politician, this later novel, my focus here, has invited a more biographical and topical approach, often involving the period's political figures. Thus, a very recent article by James A. Cook argues convincingly that the novel exacts Hawthorne's satirical revenge on a Whig enemy, Charles W. Upham, just as earlier critics have taken the character Jaffrey Pyncheon as standing in for other Whig officials (such as Nicholas Biddle or Nathaniel Silsbee) who had earned Hawthorne's scorn.³

This critical tradition of focusing on Hawthorne's concrete satirical purpose comports well with those facets of political life to which the novel limits itself: The House of the Seven Gables seems to deal with the mere epiphenomenon of the nation's politics—the false representations, empty pageantry, and relentless careerism that reduce party politics to a surface spectacle that elides the deeper challenges the period offered to the reigning faith in American progress. The novel's meditations on historical continuity and the dead hand of the past seemingly occur on a different stage altogether from these tawdry performances. if The House of the Seven Gables represents decadent party politics, that is because the novel, I propose, forecasts what at a deeper level it also promotes: the collapse of the Second Party system whose resilience prevented conservative Northerners from coalescing against the new antislavery threat. The rise of political antislavery views made the conflict between Whig and Democrat seem an indulgent habit that the nation could no longer afford. The novel does not simply satirize the daily mechanisms of party politics but projects the ending to that particular partisan divide. It does so primarily by imagining away the conditions that had seemed to make the system's antagonisms necessary: the danger of a recalcitrant aristocratic enemy always on the verge of undermining the republic by commandeering democratic forms for hidden purposes. Through a romance of villainous disguise, The House of the Seven Gables initially exaggerates this danger, only ultimately to exorcise it. The novel's conservative resolution, which has long concerned critics, depends on this exorcism.

Literary critics have shown how both The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables support Hawthorne's conservative Democratic opposition to emerging antislavery forces, which demanded that the nation take history into its own hands by actively confronting the retrogressive forces embodied in the power of slavery. Michael T. gilmore has paraphrased this critical consensus when he addresses Hawthorne's politics: "[Hawthorne] regarded idealistic political action … as [an] arrogation of God's power to dispose of human affairs when and how He saw fit."⁴ Though Gilmore discusses extensively how the end of partisanship relates to Hawthorne's quietism, detailing the specific political parties involved has always seemed secondary to exploring Hawthorne's imaginative recreation of a nation deferring to the providential historical forces that make antislavery agitation unnecessary and counterproductive. As Donald Pease remarks while summarizing this interpretive emphasis, those critics have depicted Hawthorne as endorsing "a generalized depoliticization."⁵ While the analysis offered here follows in that tradition, it also holds that what such depoliticization sacrifices lies at the core of Hawthorne's intervention in The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne's deference to natural...