The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne Research Paper

Introduction

Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote during the middle of the nineteenth century, but his style and his subjects were heavily influenced by the Puritan beliefs and lifestyles that had been so important to his ancestors and remained, to some extent, strong influences in his New England home. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts on the fourth of July as the only son among three children. This pressure was increased when he was forced, at the age of four, to move to his mother’s paternal home full of aunts and uncles following the death of his father who had contracted yellow fever during a trip to the Caribbean (Swisher, 1996).

Raised mostly by his uncles, Nathaniel spent the next five years in a stern yet creative home, showing a decided preference for creativity and a general avoidance of discipline. “Nathaniel’s passivity and indolence appeared especially unmanly in the presence of Robert Manning’s energetic capabilities, not only to the uncle but to the boy himself. The resulting self-distrust was to be permanently in conflict with Hawthorne’s innate pride” (Erlich, 1984). His family’s Puritan past, which included pilgrims landing on the continent to tame the wilderness and a judge who participated in the famous Salem Witch Trials, would weigh heavily upon him throughout his life and would be strongly reflected within his writings. Although he was strongly encouraged to take up the family trade and become a merchant marine, Hawthorne had decided, by age 17, that he wanted to be a writer.

Hawthorne’s education was extensive and provided him with some valuable contacts that would contribute to his later success. His official education started at age 15 at the Samuel H. Archer School with the intention of preparing him for college. He then entered the Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1821 (Swisher, 1996). While he was there, he formed lifelong friendships with future literary giant Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, future president Franklin Pierce and future Navy Commander Horatio Bridge. He spent another 12 years after completing college living in his mother’s house and educating himself in how to be a good writer by studying his Puritan past, nonfiction and fiction works of note (Swisher, 1996). While he always styled himself a writer, he held several small jobs necessary to support himself. These included magazine editor, customs house worker (in a variety of capacities) and as a farmer for a brief period at Brook House, an experimental commune (Swisher, 1996).

After he moved to the Lenox countryside to escape angry Salem residents, he met Herman Melville who was to have profound influence on The House of Seven Gables. “The presence of this brooding mariner, poetic soul such as Hawthorne’s father had been, stirred the deepest memories – and doubts – of the older writer. Melville’s talk of the sea, of time, eternity, death, myth, and literature, his metaphysical leaping, struck Hawthorne’s own particular woe. Hawthorne eventually recoiled from Melville’s truth – but not before giving to Moby Dick; or the Whale the bitter duplicity of his literary technique in The House of the Seven Gables” (St. John, 2002: Ch. 4). However, Lenox was not to be the permanent home of the Hawthorne and his family as they eventually purchased their own country seat in Concord, within walking distance of the Ralph Waldo Emersons and Waldon Pond. Hawthorne continued to support his family on his writing and traveled extensively with his wife, including tours through Europe. He died in a wayside hotel while on holiday with his widowed friend Franklin Pierce on May 19, 1964 and is now buried in Concord.

In addition to the writers already mentioned, Nathanial Hawthorn had a profound influence on other writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Comparisons have been made, for example, between Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Donnithorne of Adam Bede, just as Dimmesdale has been compared to the character of Godfrey Cass from Silas Marner (Eigner, 1986: 231). A list of his works could easily fill pages, but some of his more major works include The Blithdale Romance, Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, Feathertop, Twice Told Tales, The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, Mosses from an Old Manse, Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Red Letter Plays and, of course, The House of the Seven Gables.

Main Text

The House of the Seven Gables is introduced as a romance novel and is focused upon the individuals who have lived in the house throughout its history. This introduces the theme that the sins of the past can live on to torment the innocence of the living which was an underlying belief of the Puritan faith. The house with the seven gables is revealed to have come into the Pyncheon family’s possession through questionable means. The original builder of the house was hanged shortly after completing the building process on a conviction for witchcraft after Colonel Pyncheon decided he wanted Matthew Maule’s property. However, Colonel Pycheon is not able to enjoy his victory for long as he is found dead in his new study on the day of the housewarming party. His death is particularly gruesome because he is found sitting in his chair with a hideous expression on his face and with his beard covered in blood. From then on, the house seems to bring nothing but bad luck to the family.

This history has an impact upon the nearsighted scowling old maid Hepzibah who is forced to open a shop in the house as well as take on a border in order to keep herself from starving. The border is Holgrave, who is a photographic artist and the two are soon joined by Phoebe, Hepzibah’s much younger cousin and Clifford, Hepzibah’s brother who has just been released from prison. Clifford had been accused of killing the old judge, but has always maintained his innocence. The residents of the house are terrified of the current Judge Pyncheon who seems to hold the family’s prosperity in his hands while Holgrave, who advocates the idea that each generation should tear down the work of those that have come before it, presents a further threat in the form of new ideas.

Some sense of retribution is introduced through the story of Alice Pyncheon, who caught her death of pneumonia as the result of a younger Matthew Maule who had hypnotized her. This is a trait that seems to run in the Pyncheon family as Phoebe becomes entranced by Holgrave’s story. Eventually, Judge Pyncheon returns to the house again, demanding that Clifford reveal the location of the document that would return a family fortune to the judge’s pockets, but this judge is also found dead, again with the hideous look and the blood in the beard. However, this death is seen as the lifting of the family curse and all the remaining members of the household, upon hearing of the death of Judge Pyncheon’s only son, move into the judge’s country estate and leave the House of the Seven Gables to continue rotting back into the ground.

There are several themes that run through the novel, including the theme of class or social status as well as the theme of the deceptive nature of appearances. The theme of class and social status is shown through the ideas of Hepzibah and her family as well as through Holgrave, the rootless artist. The theme of the deceptiveness of appearances emerges as the old maid at the beginning of the story ends up being the heroine by the end. However, the strongest theme remains the moral of the sins of the past revisited upon the future pointed out by Hawthorne himself at the beginning of the novel. There are many indications of this throughout the story, such as in the portrait of the first Colonel Pyncheon, which has been forbidden to be taken down and which looks over every action that takes place within the home. The murder that Clifford has accused of looks suspiciously similar to the deaths of the old Colonel himself, found sitting in his chair with blood coating his shirt and beard.

Another similar death awaits Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon after his demand that Clifford turn over the missing documents that give the Pyncheon family control of a valuable and sizable piece of land. Although it is suggested in the Romantic tradition that the family’s hardships have come about as the result of a curse laid upon it by Matthew Maule from the scaffold, the true nature of the sins of the earlier generations can be found in their greed as it is only the greedy Pyncheon’s that meet with disaster. It is the result of greed that Alice is made available to the younger Matthew Maule, who is the leading cause of her death by pneumonia and it is greed that kills old Jaffrey Pyncheon who tries to keep Clifford from finding the missing land deed. Finally, it is only when Judge Pyncheon enters the house also demanding the land deed that he suffers his fit and is found dead in much the same manner as his distant grandsire.

This theme is the main focus of a discussion of the book by Rita Gollin (1979). In her essay entitled “The Past Revisits the Present in The House of the Seven Gables,” she discusses the various elements of the story that contribute to this idea. “From the start, Hawthorne describes the house as if it were human … It seems to have a will of its own” (Gollin, 1979: 132-133). She points out that the ghost of the past, represented by the portrait of the old Colonel, is reflected in the present by its resemblance to the current Judge Pyncheon, which is further emphasized by the prevailing greed and covetousness of the Judge as he tries to force Hepzibah into giving him something she doesn’t have.

The past is also tied in to the strange deaths of so many of the more greedy Pyncheon men as Matthew Maule had cursed them to drink their own blood, a profoundly accurate statement describing the deaths each would face. The innocence of the other Pyncheon’s in the story – Clifford, Hepzibah and Phoebe – is protected by various forms of dreamy escape. For Clifford, it is in his childlike mental state as he comes out of thirty years of prison. For Hepzibah, it is a somewhat staid kind of half-madness that allows her to remain in the house, kept sane by occasional interactions with her neighbors and by the love she carries for her brother. Phoebe is touched with the sweet innocence of the fresh country air from which she has come, yet proves herself also susceptible to the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the house and the vague threat of Judge Pyncheon himself.

Mark Van Doren (1949), however, chooses to focus upon the idea that The House of the Seven Gables is instead a portrait of a decaying America, losing its first blush of early success and moving into the decline prior to a new wave of innovation. He argues that the house itself, Hepzibah and Clifford represent “the decay even in America, and indeed especially in America, of hereditary estates … it as a part of it to correct the picture of Hepzibah and her house with dashes of new life in the form of Phoebe, an unspoiled country cousin, and Holgrave, a photographer who was counted on to represent in his modern ideas and his mechanical competence the coming age of America” (Van Doren, 1949: 141). In this discussion, he argues that the novel is strongest when it focuses upon the image of its pathetic characters, primarily Hepzibah herself and the house in which she lives, who exist continuously under a curse. The idea that the novel is all about rebirth is reinforced by the family’s move to the country, leaving the house of seven gables to rot back into the ground on which it is built.

Picking up on the concept of the continuous curse, Van Wyck Brooks (1954) claims that the story preserves much of the atmosphere of the old Salem without making much mention of Hawthorne’s alleged attempt to capture the modern. “The book was Salem itself, as Hawthorne saw it in these eighteen-forties. Since his boyhood there, the town had lapsed into quietude and decay … Salem was still Gothic in its frame of mind, here and there, at least. In its rusty, moss-grown gabled houses still dwelt the remnants of a race that savoured the emblems in the graveyards, the death’s heads and scythes and hour-glasses” (Brooks, 1954: 127). To Brooks, the book is about these mouldering old maids and men who remained half-hidden in their old homes and half-crazed by their memories of an earlier time, constrained by their past and the social structures of their house. Like their houses, many of the older people of Salem were incapable of changing with the new, more modern times.

Conclusion

For me, the book seems to be about all these things. It highlights the fact that the old ways were dying out to be replaced by the new, which were barely understood and often left uninvestigated because of the fear they inspired. The idea that the sins of the past could catch up with the innocents of the present was well-formulated, tying in the fantasy romantic concept of the curse from the scaffold and the forgiveness of the descendent with the practical reality of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the Pyncheon men were infected by an inordinate amount of greed. Difficult to read in places, the book nevertheless presents a dark fairy tale that remains fascinating long after it has been read.

Works Cited

Brooks, Van Wyck. “The House of the Seven Gables Captures the Atmosphere of Old Salem.” Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Heritage Press, 1954. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.

Eigner, Edwin M. “Hawthorne’s Influence on Dickens and George Eliot: A Review.” Nineteenth Century Literature. University of California Press, (1986), pp. 230-233.

Erlich, Gloria C. “The Divided Artist and His Uncles.” Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web. Rutgers University Press. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.

Gollin, Rita K. “The Past Revisits the Present in The House of the Seven Gables.” Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams. Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, 1851 (reprinted 1985).

St. John, Thomas. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Studies in the House of the Seven Gables. (2002). Web.

Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.

Van Doren, Mark. “The House of the Seven Gables: Hawthorne’s ‘Second Best Book’.” Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Viking, 1949. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.