On The Defamiliarization In The House Of The Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne is regarded as the founder of American psychoanalytic novels.The House of the Seven Gables is his second romance.This novel is based on the background that the Maules' ancestor is persecuted by the Pyncheons' ancestor.It talks about a story on the influences of ancestor's evil deeds on his offspring and the offspring's sense of guilty and striving to seek redemption.Two life's themes: evilness and salvation,are explored in this novel.Since its publication,the majority of critics' studies on The House of the Seven Gables focus on those aspects like the novel's theme and the characters' trauma.Few critics pays attention to the writing technique of defamiliarization in this novel.Defamiliarization is promoted by Victor Shklovsky,a Russian formalist.It claims that the essence of literature is literariness.It tries to make new forms to break people's mechanical perception of their familiar things.Therefore,this thesis is going to study this novel from the perspective of defamiliarization.It aims at exploring the literary beauty and literary experience brought by this novel,and how Nathaniel Hawthorn,through the skill of defamiliarization,deepens the themes of this novel.This thesis explores the defamiliarization in The House of the Seven Gables from three aspects.Firstly,the thesis studies the defamiliarization of the narration.From the aspect of narration,the defamiliarization in this novel mainly reflects in the application of the first point of view,the transformation of the point of view,the situational irony and the plot's negation of negation.A carefully chosen narrative point of view and its genius transformation can show readers a totally unfamiliar aspect of their familiar things and as a result,stimulate the readers to re-realize those familiar things.Situational irony and plot's negation of negation break readers' unconscious cognition.The tension of irony can stimulate the readers to actively understand,and perceive the contents of the novel.Secondly,the thesis studies the defamiliarization through exposing the fictionality of The House of the Seven Gables,which includes fours aspects: author intrusion,reader intrusion,hierarchical structure,and loose structure.The conventional novelists always try their best to hide their novels' fictionality.However,Hawthorn unconventionally chooses to expose his novel's fictionality,which breaks readers' common expectation to a novel and makes the readers read this novel with a sense of difficulty.In the novel written with these unconventional skills,the understanding of the contents,characters and themes and so on becomes more difficult than that in the one with conventional skills.As a result,the readers have to participate in the critical thinking of this novel,which successfully estranges the readers and the novel,as what is pursued by the defamiliarization.Lastly,the thesis analyzes the defamiliarization brought by two rhetorical techniques: trope and personification.Although trope and personification are two very common rhetorical skills,in this novel,Nathaniel Hawthorn endows these two ordinary techniques with creative thinking.Especially the unique vehicles quite different from the conventional ones make readers deeply perceive the artistic tensions and beauty caused by the similarities and differences between the tenor and the vehicle.In the process of the readers' understanding,the crash of the similarities and differences between the tenor and the vehicle gives birth to the artistic values pursued by the defamiliarization.