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. 

Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance"

[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.]

After reading “The Scarlet Letter” years ago in school, and now “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Blithedale Romance” in relatively close conjunction, there seems to be a common theme running throughout much of Hawthorne’s longer fiction: namely, the deep and abiding mistrust in ideas of utopia, progress or perfectibility, especially of the human kind. Hawthorne came from a long line of Puritans, one of whom even presided over some of the Salem witch trials. Now writing on the cusp of the Civil War, he feels the renewed need for the kind of pragmatic skepticism which, one generation later, an entire generation of American philosophers will call for.

Coverdale, the naïve narrator in search of an agrarian source of truth, discovers Blithedale (the name itself should set off bells of suspicion), a community built around the ideals of Fourier, the utopian French social theorist. Fourier thought that life could be optimized through a kind of rationalistic social engineering, the basic living unit of which he called the “phalanstere.” The hilarious (hilarious in that subtle, dowdy, Puritan way that was uniquely Hawthorne’s) part is that, once everyone in Blithedale is introduced into the mix, tensions, different ideas, passions, and ideologies start to bubble to the surface showing just what a pipedream Fourier’s utopia really is. Hawthorne’s point seems to be that holding rationality primary over contingency and human emotion is shortsighted and silly. Not only is Blithedale a folly, but the very idea of a utopia is a sheer impossibility. I’m sure that Hawthorne would have us remember the clever lesson from Thomas More’s “Utopia” – that it means, quite literally, “no place.” 

I’ll forego a lot of the plot details because I read this several months ago, and wouldn’t be able to do them justice without re-reading it. What I have unpacked here is just what jumped out at me the most. There is a strange woman named Zenobia who always wears a fresh flower in her hair, who turns out being the half-sister of a Blithedale foundling named Priscilla. The novel culminates in a set of philosophical disagreements between Coverdale and Hollingsworth, the ironically patriarchal figure whose presence hangs over Blithedale. I found the plot somewhat contrived and unrealistic, even for Hawthorne, but still very much worthwhile. 

The action is based on Hawthorne’s experiences at Brook Farm, a well-known utopian community in its own right, where he spent most of 1841, largely in an effort to save money for his marriage. He would marry Sophia Peabody (of the famous Peabody sisters) in July of the next year.