The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was amongst the first great men of letters in the young American nation, with an ancestry linked to the tumultuous social atmosphere of the country's colonization. Born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, a magistrate in the witch trials for which that town remains famous. Though it is disputed whether Nathaniel added the "w" to his last name to distance himself from these ancestors, it is clear this family history had an important influence on him.

In both of Hawthorne's most celebrated novels, there are overt themes regarding the oppressive nature of Puritan society, the lingering consequences of that oppression, and the injustice inherent therein. In The Scarlet Letter, of course, it is the persecution of the sympathetic Hester Prynne for adultery and the subsequent shunning of Hester and her daughter that raises a sense of unfairness. In The House of the Seven Gables, things are a bit more complicated. As it happens, the title structure, owned by the Pyncheon family, was not the first home to sit on the property. Instead, the site used to belong to a farmer named Maule, who engaged in a long land dispute with the influential Colonel Pyncheon over his title, a dispute that ended with Maule's remarkable death:

Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft. He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.

But Hawthorne does not stop with this simple retrospective condemnation of the errors of his ancestors. Instead, he makes pivotal to the novel's plot the possibility that Colonel Pyncheon's role in supporting this prosecution, implicitly for the purpose of securing the long-sought Maule property, would redound to his discredit:

[I]n after days, when the frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided , it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered that there was an invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule. It was well known that the victim had recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his prosecutor's conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for his spoil. At the moment of execution--with the halter about his neck, and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the scene--Maule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very words. "God," said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, "God will give him blood to drink!"

Unsurprisingly, Colonel Pyncheon quickly takes possession of the dead man's land, and proceeds to begin construction on the famous structure which inspires the book's title (Hawthorne was himself inspired by an actual Salem mansion owned by his cousins). Tempting fate by employing the executed Maule's son as his carpenter, Colonel Pyncheon oversees the successful building of his new home, only to be struck down on the very day the home is to be consecrated:

a little boy--the Colonel's grandchild, and the only human being that ever dared to be familiar with him--now made his way among the guests, and ran towards the seated figure; the pausing halfway, he began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheon's stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The ironhearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strong-willed man, was dead! Dead, in his new house!

Thus in the openings pages of Hawthorne's novel is set the sin and resulting curse which ensured the succeeding generations of Pyncheon residents in the great house would not enjoy the happiness and prosperity that Colonel Pyncheon had surely foreseen. By the novel's contemporary day, in the mid-19th century, the home is inhabited by a sole Pyncheon, the reclusive Hepzibah Pyncheon, whose financial straits are sufficiently dire that she has taken to opening a cent-shop on the house's first floor in an effort to increase her income:

A lady--who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread--this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a lifetime, had come up with her at last. She must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

She is alone in the home because her brother has been imprisoned for thirty years as the convicted murderer of their uncle, but Clifford is expected to be released soon. And she refuses any help from her successful cousin, Judge Pyncheon, who so closely resembles the original Colonel Pyncheon that portraits of his ancestor are sometimes taken to be portraits of him. The cast is completed by a mysterious boarder, Holgrave, who lives in the infamous house but keeps largely to himself, and by the arrival of young Phoebe Pyncheon, another cousin whose arrival at the home breathes new life into Phoebe and Clifford:

The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her. The sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the timeworn framework of the door--none of these things belonged to her sphere. But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the threshold. It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing open to admit her.

And thus enters the key to salvation that, as the novel progresses, offers the last hope to the last decaying occupants of the septuple-gabled residence. Hawthorne is clearly concerned throughout the book with his themes of sin, revenge, and redemption, and the resulting consequences that echo down through time. He raises the issue explicitly in his preface:

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. No to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral--the truth, namely, that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.

Surely a worthy moral, but unfortunately Hawthorne pursues it with the blunt elements of curse, catastrophe, and coincidence, those hallmarks of Gothic literature (which I like no better in Hawthorne's hands than in those of Emily Bronte). I think it no matter that Hawthorne apologizes in advance, stating in his preface that "[w]hen a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wished to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material..." Perhaps that excuses Hawthorne from a charge that he has committed some "literary crime," as he asserts in the same preface, but it adds no luster to the quality of the work.