1. Nathaniel Hawthorne Background for The House of the Seven Gables

2.  Born in Salem, Massachusetts  Family with Puritan history  Great great great grandson of John Hathorne – one of the three judges in the Salem Witch Trials (1690s) Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864

3. Hawthorne’s Background  Married Sophie Peabody in 1842, three children  A shy member of a famous literary circle: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and President Franklin Pierce  Few copyright laws meant that Hawthorne had difficulty supporting himself with his writing. He held many other jobs including publisher, a political appointment at the Boston custom house and later as political consul in England  The Scarlet Letter ( 1850) was an oft-pirated bestseller  Published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851

4. The Turner-Ingersoll House AKA The House of the Seven Gables

6. Cult of Domesticity  Ideology also known as Cult of True Womanhood  CoD emerged during the nineteenth century when women lost their status as producers of household industry in an increasingly industrialized society.  CoD naturalized the exclusion of (middle class white) women from new business world and by relegating them to the “proper sphere” of the home.  Publications like Godey’s idealized woman as Angel in the House: expected to fulfill the roles of a calm and nurturing mother, a loving and faithful wife, and a passive, delicate, and virtuous creature  Set home/private space as directly opposed to and as a refuge from the calculating, dehumanizing (male) economic world.

7. Daguerreotypes  photographic images made when a layer of photo-sensitive plate was exposed to a scene or image through a lens.  Importance of Light: Mercury vapor condensed on those places on the plate where the exposure light was most intense (highlights), and less so in darker areas of the image (shadows).  No Copies: Daguerreotypes can’t be directly transferred onto another light-sensitive medium the way that photographic negatives can.  Art or artifice? Art or science?