Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I have a vague memory of reading “The Scarlet Letter” sometime in middle school, and coming away feeling like you would expect after you’d read a novel about Puritan repression (that’s all I thought it was about at the time). “The House of the Seven Gables” was like finding a Hawthorne I’d never known before – one of ghosts, the eternal return of historical memory, and high Gothic romance. This time, it reminded me more of Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis than it did the cold Puritanism that I once associated with Hester Prynne. In this sense, it stood up to what Hawthorne identified most of his longer fiction as, that is, “romance.” 

In the late seventeenth century, the eponymous house (actually inspired by an historical 1688 colonial mansion in Salem) served as the residence of Colonel Pyncheon, who once accused a man named Matthew Maule of sorcery in order to have him hanged, and then stole the land upon which he would eventually build his house. One day, the Colonel keels over at his desk under mysterious circumstances, but his presence and his nefariousness seem to haunt the Pyncheon house in various ways.

Several generations later, Hepzibah and her intellectually challenged brother Clifford come to occupy the house. They are both descendants of the Colonel, but now the family fortune and good reputation have withered away so much that Hepzibah has to open a store in her house to make some extra money, and thinks herself an abject failure because of it. Holgrave, a daguerrotypist, rents a room from Hepzibah upstairs. One day, a distant relation to both Clifford and Hepzibah named Phoebe Pyncheon visits and manages to quickly change the whole tenor of the house: she is able to bring vim and vigor to the Hepzibah’s failing penny shop, and she gives Clifford the companionship and attention that he needs. Just as soon as she appears, however, she leaves again and the house falls into its former dilapidated state.

Judge Pyncheon, another member of the family and a wealthy man about town with an eminent reputation, appears at Hepzibah’s house and announces that he wants to institutionalize Clifford. The Judge claims that Clifford knows the whereabouts of certain documents that will allow him access to vast tracts of land in Maine. While waiting to talk to Clifford, the Judge dies in much the same way that the Colonel did so many generations before. Hepzibah and Clifford head to a train station to leave their outre circumstances. Later, Phoebe returns to the house with only the artist Holgrave in residence, and he admits how he has (admittedly, somewhat predictably) always loved her. Hepzibah and Clifford soon return to live there, with Phoebe having inherited all of the Judge’s ill-gotten land. Holgrave proclaims that he is himself a distant relative of Matthew Maule, so long ago accused of conjury. The House of Seven Gables, so long riven by tumult and strife, is finally exorcised by that ultimate mage, love. 

I read this mostly as a meditation on the transgressions of history and our inevitable tendency to bear them witness no matter how far removed in time we are from them, two of Hawthorne’s pet concerns. Indeed, it’s interesting how the sins of Colonel Pyncheon seem almost to take place in a prelapsarian past while at the same time having such a profound effect on the characters presently at hand. Hawthorne wonderfully blends the oppressiveness of the past with the stark newness of the present throughout the novel: the figures of the Salem witch trials (one of whom was Judge John Hathorne, Nathaniel’s great-great-grandfather, who found many of the “witches” guilty) haunt the novel in spirit, but so do all kinds of (then) modern technologies, from Holgrave’s daguerreotype, to the train that Hepzibah and Clifford use to escape the ghosts of their pasts. Published in 1851 and with the possibility of freedom from the past being central to the novel, Hawthorne might have meant for this to be, at least in some respects, a commentary on the coming Civil War. As Faulkner, another American equally concerned with the onus of history said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

I enjoyed it so much I immediately picked up “The Blithedale Romance,” a review of which will be posted soon.