The Quietude of Conscience and the magnetism of sound: listening to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables

Abstract

In :The House of the Seven Gables" Nathaniel Hawthorne employs a soundscape particularly attuned to the modern dissonances and spiritual soundings of antebellum America. His novel interrogates the impact of these auditory-acoustic structures on constructions of the self, ultimately revealing the politics of audibility emerging in the nineteenth century.