ABSTRACT
In Ancient Rome, privacy was associated with property and the body, a realm of materiality and necessity inferior to the business of the res publica. In the nineteenth century privacy began to emerge in the United States as a right. By the middle of the century, law, literature, and other discourses have begun to articulate and distinguish a right to privacy. By the time Ten Years among the Mail Bags was published, private life came to be thought of as both precious and immensely significant. To better understand the complexities that characterize the right to privacy in the United States, one need to consider the three bedrocks in which it grew: liberalism, romanticism, and sentimentalism. Associating privacy with the expression of a unique subjective core, the romantic writer encountered a conundrum. In The House of the Seven Gables' Preface, another aspect of the emergent right to privacy momentarily surfaced: its connection to property rights.
