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The House of the Seven Gables, in detail
The House of the Seven Gables opens with a grim inheritance: the Pyncheon family's ancestral mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, was built on land seized from a man named Matthew Maule through a dubious accusation of witchcraft. Maule cursed the Pyncheons as he died, and the novel's action — set two centuries later — is Hawthorne's extended argument that the curse has been working ever since. The family is trapped in decline, haunted by old guilt and old property, while the Maule descendants live in obscurity nearby.
The novel follows Hepzibah Pyncheon, an elderly, near-sighted woman who has kept the house and its seven gables intact through sheer inertia, and her recently returned brother Clifford, who has spent thirty years in prison for a murder most readers suspect he didn't commit. Into this stalled situation comes their young cousin Phoebe, who represents energy, practicality, and the possibility of renewal — and Holgrave, a young daguerreotypist who turns out to have an unexpected connection to the family's history.
The book is slower and more domestic than The Scarlet Letter, and its allegorical weight sits heavier on the story. Hawthorne is interested in the question of whether a family — or a nation — can ever be free of its founding crimes, and whether physical inheritance (the house, the portrait, the deed) keeps guilt alive in ways that deliberate memory wouldn't. The novel was more popular with contemporary readers than The Scarlet Letter, which should tell you something about its accessibility and something about what nineteenth-century readers wanted.
The House of the Seven Gables is the second-tier Hawthorne — essential for anyone seriously interested in the author, but not the place to start, and less forceful than The Scarlet Letter in its moral geometry. The atmosphere is gothic, the pacing is leisurely, and the ending is considerably more optimistic than the rest of the book earns. Read it as an expansion of Hawthorne's preoccupations rather than a complete achievement in itself.
The big ideas
- 1.
The house itself is the novel's central character — it embodies the accumulation of Pyncheon guilt, and its physical deterioration mirrors the family's moral and material decline.
- 2.
Hawthorne argues that property acquired through injustice can transmit that injustice across generations — an idea that is less allegorical and more historical than it may initially appear.
- 3.
Hepzibah's predicament — an aristocrat forced to open a cent-shop to survive — is treated with sympathy and comedy simultaneously. She is more human than most characters in Hawthorne's fiction.
