![]() ![]() By nomadization, I refer to some of the spatial effects of globalization at this stage of its development, in which local homes, traditions, economies, and identities are increasingly supplanted by interconnected, uprooted, and transient identities, and space and time become increasingly entangled and compressed. For Hawthorne, the not so celestial railroad is an emblem not only of modernity, but secularization, class destabilization, and what we might see as a form of proto-nomadization. ![]() ![]() Clifford’s reaction to the new spatialization the railroad augured encapsulates one of the novels’ central concerns-how travel and mobility will eviscerate, or emancipate us from, social bonds. In this artice, I explore how Hawthorne addresses the relationship between spatial and social mobility in his depictions of railroads, and I partly focus on the chapter in The House of the Seven Gables in which Clifford and Hepzibah travel by train. ![]()
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