First Gable
To have a ghost, you must first have a past.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an author with a past. His fictions repeatedly return us to the foundations of the United States, weaving narrative from the way that his past lingered in his present, from a haunting. He prefaces The House of the Seven Gables (1851) with a simple lesson, that “this Romance might effectually convince mankind (or, indeed, any one man) of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.” This lesson—past evils will destroy those who come to benefit from them—guides the haunted house tale, wherein the cracked foundations of the past must be repaired, lest the house, like Poe’s House of Usher, crumble into the earth, along with all it signifies: family, nation, hope. These are vast problems, bigger than any one house, but locating evil in a haunted place lets Americans concentrate the past’s wrongness. The haunted house is a place where we deal with how things have gone wrong.
The United States is a nation where ghosts are real. At least, they’re as real as the houses they haunt. The House of the Seven Gables depicts a house that is not ostensibly haunted by ghosts or demons; rather, it is demonized by the generational reproduction of wrongs and inequalities where haunting provides the syntax for Hawthorne to make sense of this repetition. The haunted house tale, as Hawthorne tells it, has governed the way that Americans reckon with their out-of-joint past. Hawthorne positions House as a “romance,” rather than a novel, and the former genre’s capacity for moralistic fables captures something of this House’s function as a floor-plan for a particularly American haunting. In Richard Brodhead’s account, Hawthorne’s widespread influence in American literature often has less to do with anything he himself said or wrote than with the way that later authors bring their own concerns to Hawthorne and rework his myths to their own ends. So, it’s not that Hawthorne haunts American literature; rather, that literary tradition has haunted him.
Across this history, the word “haunted” provides a vocabulary for the forces outside individual control, as well as the way that we, as individuals, are constrained by them, even and especially when we cannot perceive or even comprehend what they are. As Sigmund Freud points out, “haunted” is already a limited translation of “unheimlich,” and the repeated description of houses in particular as haunted illustrates some of the way that this vocabulary guides both thought and actions. Being haunted is, in a sense, the experience of being constrained, whether by another’s will or by the blunt necessity of historical circumstance. So, if I tell you a house is haunted, you might expect to encounter ghosts, dead bodies, perhaps the devil himself, but what you’ll find is, unfortunately, much worse.