The House of the Seven Gables begins with a preface that identifies the work as a romance, not a novel. As such, Hawthorne prepares readers for the fluid mixture of realism and fantasy that the romance genre allows. The preface also conveys the major theme of the book, which Hawthorne refers to as a moral: “the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and . . . becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.”...