“The ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on”: Specters of Servitude in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables

Ultimately, Hawthorne exposes the oppressive nature of domestic work by connecting servants to the spectral in The House of the Seven Gables; however, his critique is limited by his prejudices as a middleclass employer. [...]while acknowledging the servant problem, The House of the Seven Gables also reflects frustration at the proposed methods to correct what employers saw as a flawed system that failed to provide them with competent, complaisant domestics. According to Jean Fagan Yellin, Mrs. Peters and the Hawthornes had a "distanced relationship that follow[ed] established patterns of racial etiquette" ( 141 ), and Hawthorne's quip that Mrs. Peters "is going home to-night, and will return in the morning" because her "husband is sick or unwell (probably drunk)" betrays the disdain of the working classes that periodically surfaces in his journal (8:446). [...]while Phoebe and Holgrave enjoy a largely egalitarian division of labor (albeit one confined by traditional gender roles), Holgrave's readiness to recant his earlier principles once he has been assimilated into society by means of his marriage presents the potential of further degeneration into feudal and oppressive domestic ideologies. Hawthorne's personal attitudes towards abolitionism and how his political beliefs manifest themselves in his fiction have long been topics of interest for scholars. Since Ryan's scholarship suggests that it is impossible to separate the intertwined discourses of paid labor and chattel slavery, a closer look at the servants both in The House of the Seven Gables and elsewhere in Hawthorne's fictions provides scholars with a new point of access for unpacking Hawthorne's slippery position on race and American slavery.