MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Among the repeated references to and encounters with modern life in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, the train stands out as a prominent harbinger of modernity; and it also signifies more than that. Chapter seventeen, “The Flight of Two Owls,” comprises the first and arguably only scene that is not set in the encroaching house that the novel revolves around, or in its direct vicinity. The train de-centers Hepzibah and Clifford, the desolate elderly heirs of the once-grand Pyncheon mansion, and separates them from the gloomy abode their lives revolve around. Here, Hawthorne creates a curious scene that has generally been dismissed as “illusory” escape or “Clifford’s lunatic liberation” (Cronkhite, Baym). Yet, merely viewing this salient episode as an aborted and in the end meaningless attempt at flight does neither this scene nor the novel justice.

Reading The Seven Gables and the train episode in particular against and with Homi Bhabha’s concepts of (cultural) hybridity and ‘third space’ may provide an alternative way of looking at Hawthorne’s overall novel. Bhabha attempts, among other things, to conceptualize the generative potentials that underlie encounters between colonizer and colonized. At first glance, this postcolonial approach may not appear to readily lend itself to a reading of The Seven Gables. Still, the characters, especially Hepzibah and Clifford, interact with and at the same time continuously negotiate their opposition to modernity and society; they resist incorporation, trying to remain separate and pure, but they do so from a marginalized position. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to trace and investigate hybridity throughout the narrative, especially in relation to the train in the novel, and to thereby re-imagine the train episode in terms of an enunciation of third space, as an affirmative enunciation of potentiality.