Along the Wayside, Fall 2024

There will be a roundtable session entitled “The House of the Seven Gables: Wood, Ink, and Stone” with the following participants:The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society invites members of the American Literature Association to join us for the House of the Seven Gables Annual Lecture, featuring Robert Levine, who will speak on “Haunted Houses: The House of the Seven Gables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on Sunday, May 25, 2025, at 1:00 p.m. at the House of the Seven Gables, 115 Derby St, Salem, MA 01970.In order to make it possible for ALA members to attend and have a maritime experience, we have arranged group pricing on the ferry from Boston to Salem and back on Sunday, May 25. Discounted tickets can be purchased through the Hawthorne Society by reaching out to Chuck Baraw at [email protected]’s fiction and nonfiction often pivots on family structures and climactic moments of family epiphanies, whether in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” or, with the budding cousinship of Hepzibah, Clifford, and Phoebe in The House of the Seven Gables. Character epiphanies are often aligned with awareness of inter or intrafamilial symmetry or resemblances. Family bloodlines are like tendrils in Hawthorne’s fiction, finding new branches of relations along the way. Hawthorne’s families often are unconventional—comprising strange pairs (e.g., Chillingworth and Dimmesdale or Chillingworth and Pearl; Hepzibah and Clifford; Zenobia and Priscilla) and harrowing interactions. Even conventional families seem always to be hemmed-in somehow by some cruel force, scientific experiment, or haunted house, as in “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Hawthorne’s family structures are often elusive, complicated, or unresolved, but remain crucial to developments within his fiction. As Lois A. Cuddy has noted in “Mother-Daughter Identification in The Scarlet Letter,” “The mother and child appear together in just about every scene in the novel, especially in those situations in which Hester must deal with other members of the community” (Mosaic 19, no. 2 [1986], 101). Family members, whether known or unknown in relations, come into focus especially within the public sphere, as in The Scarlet Letter or “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Many of Hawthorne’s histories, like The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair, and his children’s stories, like “Little Annie’s Ramble,” have implied or stated family relations at the center of their storytelling. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society welcomes 250–300-word proposals on family relations, family resemblances, and bloodlines within Hawthorne’s corpus for this guaranteed session at MLA 2026. Mail to: [email protected] by March 28, 2025.