Fired up settlers: Nicholas Spengler, ‘Playing with fire: unhousing and unsettlement at the antebellum hearthside’, Textual Practice, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Fired up settlers: Nicholas Spengler, ‘Playing with fire: unhousing and unsettlement at the antebellum hearthside’, Textual Practice, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article compares Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Melville’s Pierre (1852) as antebellum US ‘romances’ in which the hearthside is represented not as a nostalgic emblem of domestic stability and sociality but as a contested site of property and labour. Through a framework that relates Paula Geyh’s ‘unhousing’ to Anna Brickhouse’s ‘unsettlement’ and Mark Rifkin’s ‘settler common sense’, I read the hearth in House and Pierre as inspiring thoughts and acts of fiery rebellion against the house and the legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism on which it is founded. Holgrave and Clifford fantasise about burning down the titular house in Hawthorne’s novel, and Melville’s Pierre sets fire to a part of his legacy – his father’s portrait – as he abandons the family hearth to live with Isabel, the dark-featured woman who claims to be his half-sister. While these arsonist impulses suggest a form of ‘unhousing’ that attempts to reform the settler sovereignty and racial narcissism of the family, I argue that Isabel performs the more radical gesture of ‘unhousing’, one that alludes to the domestic insurrections of Black servants and slaves who refused their subordinate position by burning the homes and bodies of their masters.

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