ABSTRACT

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), published after The Scarlet Letter and after Hawthorne was already an acclaimed author, provides one model for the ways antebellum writers attempted to understand the entrenchment of daguerreotypy in their world. This romance raises metarepresentational questions about the relationship between print and visual culture through its main character, Holgrave, the Daguerreotypist. A textual interpretation of the relationship between Holgrave and storytelling, this chapter reads The House of the Seven Gables as Hawthorne’s portentous warning that photography is taking hold in the modern world at the expense of written narrative. He associates the daguerreotype with a decline in the importance of print culture and with a burgeoning middleclass consumer economy that ruptures the connection between his present and the Puritan past.