A memorable title and immersive setting are the main takeaways people get from this American classic, which seems fair to me. When a novelist accomplishes one thing so brilliantly, why carp about the characters or story?
A fiction set around a real building, still extant in Salem, Massachusetts, The House Of The Seven Gables concerns the Pyncheons, once a proud Puritan family now brought low by poverty and greed. How low we discover early in the book, when scowling spinster Hepzibah Pyncheon takes the radical step of turning part of the mansion into a cent shop.
She needs money to support herself and her mentally-impaired brother, Clifford. At the moment, the only money in her family belongs to her cousin Jaffrey, a judge and politician who embodies the Pyncheons’ cruel legacy. Hepzibah knows too well not to trust his offers of help.
A beam of light interrupts the mansion’s gloom in the form of Phoebe, a luminous relative who shows up needing a place to live. Hepzibah is too kind to refuse. But is Phoebe’s drive to do good enough to overcome centuries of malevolent inertia represented by that house?
The House of the Seven Gables is not only our principal setting. It is our main character, too:
But as for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So much of mankind’s varied experience had passed there – so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed – that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and somber reminiscences.
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| The House of the Seven Gables as it stands now in Salem, Massachusetts. Built in 1668, it had been reduced to just three gables when Hawthorne visited his cousin there. The others were added back as part of an extensive 20th century restoration. Image from https://www.salem.org/listing/house-of-seven-gables/ |
Hawthorne visited the real-life house many times when it was owned by his cousin, Susanna Ingersoll; something of its nature seemed to affect him deeply. In a short preface, he observes “that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.”
In the novel, wrongdoing takes the form of property theft, accompanied by an accusation of witchcraft against its rightful owner. The real house doesn’t have such a legacy, but Hawthorne’s ancestor John Hathorne was one of the judges who sentenced people to death for being accused of witchcraft. An implacable past colors the book; so does a vague disquiet about the cutthroat nature of American capitalism in general:
In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point.
Themes of judgment and doom are everywhere, yet House is not a gloomy novel. Parts of it are rather jaunty.
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| Hepzibah's Cent Shop, as it stands today at the House of the Seven Gables. Like other parts of the house, it was added to the house in 1910 to make it line up better with the novel. Hepzibah's shop as described by Hawthorne is more shabby than this. Image from https://www.facebook.com/7gables/photos/tbt-to-the-cent-shop-created-in-the-house-of-the-seven-gables-when-caroline-emme/10154075907393411/ |
Take Hepzibah’s introduction, opening her shop. She is described with affection, but also a few zingers on account of her shut-in personality and unpleasant face, which time has formed into a perpetual frown. So unaccustomed is she to human interaction that she is overwhelmed by her first customer, a small boy who just wants to buy a cookie. Hawthorne makes clear only the boy’s limitless appetite keeps him from bolting from the sight of this frightening-looking woman.
Later, we are told her brother Clifford also has an issue with this: In his last extremity, the expiring breath stealing faintly Clifford’s lips, he would doubtless press Hepzibah’s hand, in fervent recognition of all her lavished love, and close his eyes but not so much to die as to be constrained to look no longer on her face!
Once Phoebe comes in, the book settles into a pleasing, pastoral vein. We meet a family of chickens kept in the Pyncheon garden, of proud but fallen stock much like their owners. Phoebe makes the acquaintance of Hepzibah’s other main revenue source, a boarder who goes by the name Holgrave and specializes in the novel art of daguerreotypes. This makes him one of literature’s first photographers.
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| A daguerreotype of Hawthorne, taken by Mathew Brady between 1850-1855. Hawthorne's object with his novel, explained in his Preface, is to impart "a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth that the act of the
passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in
a far-distant time." Image from https://www.loc.gov/item/2004663987/ |
Holgrave’s specialty is portraiture. For that and other things he values sunlight, a commodity he notes is quite scarce in the old dark house:
“There is a wonderful insight in heaven’s broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit only for depicting the mirror surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it. There is, at least, no flattery in my humble line of art.”
There is a lot in the way of wit and wisdom to enjoy in The House Of Seven Gables, but its main claim to greatness is The House. Hawthorne had a knack for old Yankee buildings, whether it was Hester’s prison or the Custom House in The Scarlet Letter, the Old Manse described in the preface to Mosses From An Old Manse, or the Province House featured in Twice-Told Tales.
Here Hawthorne demonstrates the dynamism of standing still and breathing in a setting. Rooms creak and sigh with age. An arched window looks out on a stately elm. Ghosts seem to dart just out sight of the perceptive Phoebe. Even the bric-a-brac that has accumulated over the years gets the mordant Hawthorne treatment:
In the way of furniture, there were two tables: one, constructed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede; the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time the ancient tea table had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they could have been adopted.
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| Vincent Price in a 1940 movie adaptation of House. The film, as well as a 1963 adaptation Price also starred in, Twice-Told Tales, stray far from the story. But some elements, like the brooding, haunting portrait of an ancestor seen here, are retained. Image from https://www.thesoundofvincentprice.com/the-house-of-the-seven-gables-1940/ |
Gothic elements are played up throughout. There is a haunted harpsichord, a painting that seems to shift in anger as important matters are discussed, and Clifford’s ever-cloudy reveries. Late in the book we are even given a vision of unquiet Puritan ghosts parading through the hallway. Hawthorne never goes all in with these elements; he was not Edgar Allan Poe. These ghosts seem more suggested than real.
Hawthorne also shirks from gloominess by focusing on brighter elements like Phoebe and the garden, which offers an oasis for Holgrave’s treasured sunlight, and enchanting moonlight, too:
A hundred mysterious years were whispering among the leaves, whenever the slight sea breeze found its way thither and stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summer house, the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and play, according as the chunks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted or shut out the glimmer.
Having to read chapter after chapter of descriptions like these is ample reward for a novel that does little with its main storyline, other than whip it out late and wrap it up abruptly. We don’t get introduced to the central plot until two-thirds in. Judge Jaffrey casts a deep shadow but barely figures in the action itself, while Clifford undergoes a sudden personality change for reasons unexplained. And believe it or not, the most intense sequence in the entire book involves a man seated motionless on a chair.
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| Clifford Pyncheon is a brooding, misunderstood figure, a living ghost regarded with unease by neighbors: "A slumberous veil diffused itself over his countenance, and had an
effect, morally speaking, on its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like
that which a brooding mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of
a landscape." 1875 illustration by John Dalziel from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Seven_Gables |
It is a stark contrast from The Scarlet Letter, which has none of House’s charm or humor but presents a highly dynamic plot and vital, multifaceted characters. House is more concerned with imparting homier truths about the everyday nature of life. It is diverting if at times inert.
For example, that theme of ancestral sin is managed rather breezily for all the setup it gets. In the book, exorcising that sin is a simple matter of leaving a house for a few hours and letting its age-old curse victimize someone else. Money may be at the root of all evil, yet in House it also will offer salvation of a practical, earthbound kind.
When I was in college, I wrote a paper about The House Of The Seven Gables. It trotted out what seemed the safe idea that the ancestral sin of the Pyncheons related to my country’s history of using people terribly in pursuit of wealth. I remember referencing symbols cited in my reference sources, like gingerbread cookies marketed as “Jim Crows” and lost Native American deeds, as being clues to this purpose.
Reading it now makes me doubt such an expansive 20th-century progressive reading. Hawthorne’s book is very specifically about white people alone; its sin is one committed by one white person against another.
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| “God will give him blood to drink!” The curse of Matthew Maule, depicted in this 1948 Classics Illustrated adaptation of House, brings down not only dastardly Colonel Pyncheon but also many of his descendants. Image from https://7gables.org/2019/10/31/comic-book-history-lecture/ |
If you want a modern context, there is a strong class focus to the story, not so much around sin as status and wealth. Both Judge Jaffrey’s patronizing manner around the public and Hepzibah’s comic fear of them suggest the folly of elitism. Meeting Judge Jaffray, Phoebe is vexed by the question of “whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp and respectability could really, in any single instance, be otherwise than just and upright men.”
This
social commentary is more effective for the gentle way Hawthorne employs it. His
stated goal was to write a happier book than Scarlet Letter, and he
certainly did. If House doesn’t have quite the same heft or vigor as Scarlet Letter, it doesn’t really have
to. Its singular setting, and the way it is so vibrantly, tactilely described, is
more than enough.
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