Haunting Grounds: Placelessness as a Literary Ghost 

There is something spectral about North American land. Something reminiscent of the violence needed to create the very existence of the United States.

Land has a very powerful message to convey in both The House of the Seven Gables and 'The Iroquois Creation Story.' In both texts, there is a feeling of a ‘more than human’ force at work. However, the distinction between the texts is that while The House of the Seven Gables highlights its characters haunting vis-à-vis ancestry, 'The Iroquois Creation Story' gestures towards Turtle Island as a ghost that haunts the formation of the United States.

The House of the Seven Gables frames haunting in terms of lineage, as the Pyncheon family experiences a litany of events that can all be traced back to Colonel Pyncheon’s actions and the resulting effects in relation to the Maule family. Hawthorne confirms this understanding of haunting when he writes, “The popular imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule; the curse, which the latter flung from his scaffold, was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a part of the Pyncheon inheritance” (17).

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Hawthorne’s use of the word “inheritance” has a dual meaning. The first meaning is quite literal, the Pyncheon inheritance, in terms of wealth, land and capital, is a large part of the book’s story. The second meaning refers to Maule’s “curse,” where the haunting of the Pyncheon family is derived. Here, it is intelligible that, as time passes and descendants of the Colonel come into existence, the “curse” will continue to manifest throughout the family’s timeline.

The “curse” converges with the “inheritance,” creating descendants of Colonel Pyncheon that retain his greed and grim character. The Judge, for example, is a character viewed as evil and vile. When encountering the Judge, Phoebe briefly sees the Judge’s true nature when his face is perceived as “cold, hard, immitigable, like a day-long brooding cloud” (Hawthorne 85). Reflecting on Hawthorne’s description of Matthew Maule’s understanding that he was being “hunted to death” after recognizing the Colonel’s “personal enmity,” it is clear that the Pyncheon family is haunted by an identity-shaping darkness (7). This “personal enmity” is the same oppositional character seen in the Judge’s uncomfortable encounter with Phoebe. By rhetorically constructing the Judge as a malevolent character, similar to the Colonel, Hawthorne is presenting an understanding of identity within the family as something that never drastically changes, as there is a force at work molding descendants into the form of the Pyncheon patriarch.

Contradictory to Hawthorne’s tragic tale, “The Iroquois Creation Story” is a story of birth, life and commencement. Rather than understanding land as an object, “The Iroquois Creation Story” views land as the back of a turtle that “increased every moment and became a considerable island of earth” (Cusick 6). The name of this island is not mentioned by Cusick; however, it is commonly referred to as ‘Turtle Island.’ Turtle Island is viewed by Native Americans not as a passive object to be mastered, which is the way settlers view(ed) the land, but a living, breathing agent that possesses subjectivity. In the story, an unnamed woman has become pregnant and, while sleeping, “the very place sunk down towards the dark world.” It is at this point, in a moment of peril and grave danger, that the turtle ascended and a “small quantity of earth was varnished on the back part of the turtle” (Cusick 5). Had it not been for the turtle’s ascendance and saviorism, the woman’s fate could have fallen into the hands of pure darkness. The turtle, then, represents the conception and fruitful sustenance of the world.

“The Iroquois Creation Story,” while not exactly a ‘ghost story,’ foreshadows a haunting of the United States. European expansion into the Americas and the ensuing genocide of Native Americans have created a haunting of their own. Through the theft and colonization of native land, all that remains is the specter of the indigenous inhabitants. While it is arguable that native peoples are haunted by remnants of past colonization and the transmogrified settler-colonialism of today, Turtle Island always haunts back. It is the western conception of nonhumans as objects that does violence unto land, viewing it a little more than a resource, place to settle upon or new frontier to conquer.

The House of the Seven Gables is more concerned with the quarrels of settlers upon stolen land than it is with the fact that the land is stolen. The book begins by explaining how the Maule family once occupied the land before the seven gabled house was constructed, however the description leading into this revelation is reminiscent of settler-colonial rhetorical violence. Hawthorne writes, “The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it looks now, was not the first habitation erected by civilized man, on precisely the same spot of ground” (6). Prior to establishing the area of ‘New England,’ a wide array of natives lived in the very region that the book’s story takes place within. Hawthorne’s choice of “civilized man” implies that, even prior to the Maule estate, there were habitations built, however those do not deserve to be mentioned because the logical conclusion is that those populations were ‘savage’ and ‘uncivilized.’ This move to erase indigenous peoples is a tactic of literal and metaphorical colonization – the colonization of place and history itself.

Whereas “The Iroquois Creation Story” recognizes the importance and essence of land, The House of the Seven Gables is plagued by placelessness. The characters within Hawthorne’s work have no relation to land other than their own misunderstood colonial past. Indeed, a central aspect of the book’s plot is the family’s desire to acquire a deed to land in Maine. Hawthorne notes, “not only had his son and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was a claim, through an Indian deed … to a vast, and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of eastern lands” (14). Placelessness, similar to the aforementioned dual meaning of “inheritance,” refers to both the inability to locate the deed as well as the inability of the book’s characters to realize their inhabitance of stolen land.

What is more troubling, perhaps, is that the land in question is only capable of being obtained through what Hawthorne calls an “Indian deed.” While it may be true that deeds of such nature are signed over to settlers via natives, it is hard to believe that such an event is uncoerced. It is significant to note that the land itself represents placelessness, as the reader knows not of what tribes lived upon the land, just that they were ‘Indians,’ which repeats the erasure of the specificity of indigenous lived experience and identity. While this erasure is present, it also collides with native haunting. Despite the book’s explicit attempt to deny both the indigenous peoples’ and the land’s agency, the result is a recognition that the entire story takes place upon grounds that are exemplary of, and necessarily tethered to, colonialism.

While indigenous sovereignty claims exist in terms of land presence, “The Iroquois Creation Story” showcases an entirely different understanding of place when juxtaposed with The House of the Seven Gables. Contrary to The House of the Seven Gables’ understanding of land as something to be fought over in land grabs, quests for deeds and murder to obtain another colonizer’s space, “The Iroquois Creation Story” represents a reciprocal relationship to land, where giving respect and love to the agency of land produces livelihood, sustenance and abundance for its indigenous occupants in return. Haunting provides a useful analytic for analyzing both texts. On the one hand, The House of the Seven Gables understands haunting in terms of lineage, whereas “The Iroquois Creation Story” forebodes a haunting of colonized land through its implicit understanding of land as a subject in and of itself.