The House of the Seven Gables plays with the boundaries between genres. For the most part, it fits the definition of a Gothic novel. Gothic novels often feature houses or castles that characters fight over, and these properties tend to be haunted by previous owners or inhabitants who were wronged. Sometimes these dead victims were murdered by the property's current owner or one of their ancestors. Invariably, whatever happened to them prevented them from leaving their property to their descendants. Seemingly supernatural occurrences in Gothic novels, such as ghost sightings, often turn out to have real-world explanations after all; it is usually a guilty conscience that makes someone see ghosts, rather than the actual presence of ghosts.
The Gothic genre took off in Britain and Europe in the 18th century, as the middle class rose to prominence and the right to own property became more widely claimed and debated. The genre also became popular in the early United States. In American Gothic literature, racism is an even more common theme than it is in European Gothic literature because European American settlers have always consolidated wealth through exploitation and violence against people of color. Hawthorne's novel places the drama of the Pyncheons, the Maules, and their contested property against the backdrop of land disputes between white settlers and American Indian peoples. He also includes references to Jim Crow, a stereotyped blackface character white Americans used for many decades to dehumanize Black people and justify stealing their labor and wealth. The Pyncheons are haunted by their guilty consciences over stealing from the Maules and by their guilt over their role in the Salem Witch Trials. Their superstitious belief in witchcraft makes them believe that they are haunted by an actual curse.
Even though Hawthorne's book conforms to so many conventions of the Gothic novel, he insists in his preface that it is not a novel at all, but rather a "romance." He claims that whereas a novel must attempt to depict realistic events, a romance has more leeway to explore the fantastical and the unexplained. There are plausible technological and scientific explanations for the strange events in The House of the Seven Gables, but Hawthorne does not spell all of them out for the reader. Instead, he leaves room for some of the supernatural occurrences to be real, if imagining them as such helps the reader get something out of the novel. For example, he does not explain exactly what heritable medical condition causes the Pyncheon men to die, seemingly by choking on their own blood. It is quite possible that this is a real illness, but the reader has room to keep thinking Maule has cursed the Pyncheons. Hawthorne wants his "romance" to provoke thought more than he wants it to drive home a specific point. As he states in the preface, he is not interested in "impal[ing] the story with its moral...as by sticking a pin through a butterfly—thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude." He wants his book to be more alive to interpretation than a more straightforward Gothic novel might be.
