The “Quietude of Conscience” and the Magnetism of Sound: Listening to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables

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.