The House of the Seven Gables

The House of the Seven Gables Review

Nathaniel Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, the same year as Moby-Dick and just one year after The Scarlet Letter, and the three novels together represent the most concentrated period of literary achievement in nineteenth-century American fiction. Where The Scarlet Letter is austere, Puritan in its moral rigour and its physical setting, The House of the Seven Gables is warmer and more domestic — the sin is older, the curse more diffuse, the setting a decaying Salem house rather than a scaffold. It is a novel about the way that the past physically inhabits the present, how an original crime deforms everything that comes after it.

The backstory is Puritan and all too familiar in New England: Colonel Pyncheon, in the seventeenth century, desired the land on which the house now stands, and the man who owned it — a carpenter named Matthew Maule — was executed for witchcraft on Pyncheon’s false testimony. Before his execution, Maule cursed the family: “God will give him blood to drink.” The house was then built on Maule’s land. The Pyncheon who first possessed it died on the day of its opening with blood on his face, choking. The curse, whether supernatural or simply psychological — the metaphor of guilt as physical contamination — runs through every subsequent generation.

In the novel’s present, the house is inhabited by Hepzibah Pyncheon, an elderly spinster of decayed gentility who has spent decades in the house’s shadowy interior and must now, in desperation, open a cent-shop in the front room — a degradation that pains her enormously. Her brother Clifford, a sensitive and aesthetically refined man destroyed by a wrongful imprisonment arranged by their cousin, returns to the house as a broken, passive figure. Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, the cousin who engineered Clifford’s imprisonment, is the novel’s villain: a man of perfect public respectability and private corruption, whose handsome face conceals the original wrongdoer’s grasping nature.

Holgrave, a daguerreotypist who rents one of the house’s upper rooms, represents America’s reform energy: he is interested in the past as something to be understood and escaped, not preserved and inherited. His relationship with Phoebe Pyncheon, Hepzibah’s young and fresh country cousin who arrives to help run the cent-shop, provides the novel’s romantic element and its resolution. Hawthorne was self-conscious about the ending’s cheerfulness after the novel’s Gothic gloom — he acknowledged in his preface that the book tends “romanceward” and resists the tragic implications of its own premises. The curse is lifted, the villain dies, the young people inherit. The house’s darkness gives way to sunshine.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Hawthorne’s most fully domestic Gothic, and a sustained argument that the past is a structure we live in rather than a story we have finished telling.