The House Of The Seven Gables (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
… for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation… Exodus 20:5It has always been a wonder for me why punishment should be as such. Why is this idea of making descendants suffer for their forefather’s mistakes so recurring in literature? Including this passage from the bible, there are countless other works which involve this sad practice; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables is one of the more renowned cases. With the infamous line “God will give him blood to drink!” the life of Coronel Pyncheon and his descendants are tainted with darkness and gloom. But why include the innocent? Why stain the pure with blood before they even take their first breath? It may not be as obvious as such curses, but it occurred to me that even without these often thunderous pronunciations of hexes, the lives of future generations are often so greatly affected by their ancestors that such curses prove to be superfluous in the success or downfall of a lineage. If, say, an ancestor gives you the handicap of poverty, then it is more probable that you would be born in hard circumstances. Having no material advantages at all, you would have to work infinitely to improve your living conditions. Alas, if you are given the advantage of luxury, being born in a well-endowed family, then you owe your well-being to your ancestors. A descendant is almost insured of a good life having such great advantages as money and power without working for it. It is laughable how much our life is dictated by one person’s decision two or three generations before us. This common occurrence in literature of making descendants suffer for their ancestors, in my perspective, is a tool meant to accentuate the power that an ancestor holds over his lineage. It implicates its effects by showing it in a more obvious form. In direct contrast with this lineal punishment is the practice of building a great house for posterity, this is where the house of seven gables comes in. The house, signifying Colonel Pyncheon’s good intentions for posterity, shows how an ancestor can plunge his lineage into wrong thinking of their welfare. The house, it would seem, represents everything that is wrong with the dead making decisions for the living. First, the curse that it incurred. Second, considering the number of his descendants, it proved that so large a house was unnecessary for Colonel Pyncheon’s lineage considering upkeep and maintenance. Third, like the portrait, and considering their history of gloom, it serves as a reminder for all the negativity and sadness that has haunted the home through the years. Aside from these long-term decisions, another recurring point in the novel is the feud with the Mauls. People heedlessly and often without sufficient reason are tangled into bitter conflict because of some unknown spat their grandfathers had years ago. Of course, the resolution of the two clans in the end proved to be more optimistic than expected, but the said rivalry because of lineage is one practice as contemptible as pronouncing punishment unto future generations. In the end, I can only agree with Holgrave’s discourse: “… a Dead Man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer than he. A Dead Man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in Dead Men’s books! We laugh at Dead Men’s jokes, and cry at Dead Men’s pathos! We are sick of Dead Men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity, according to Dead Men’s forms and creeds! Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man’s icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes away to what point we may, a Dead Man’s white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves, before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will be then no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere.” Of course, one cannot be so naïve as to brush aside our forefather’s examples and achievements before us. We learn much by their examples and owe our comfort to them, but the daguerreotypist has a point. The living should be more accountable for decisions they make and more responsible for the changes that occur during their lifetime. That being said, we cannot discount that our ancestors will have a major role in determining whether we have our head-starts or our pits, but we should bear in mind that it is only the starting situation they influence. The rest is up to us. We can control our destiny; we have the power to do so. “For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailor is so exorable as one’s self!”Hawthorne sought to write a story which would show guilt to be a trick of the imagination. The curse of the Pyncheons and the house of seven gables at the start of the novel is treated as folklore but slowly as the book unfolds turns into something you may consider otherwise. The calamities that befall the clan and the traceable hand that the Mauls play can make you believe the said curse. But as the book ends, a scientific and realistic explanation is given. Sometimes, we put too much weight on what people say about us that we believe it and make it so of our own accord. So that our downfall is sometimes caused by our very own volition. Nobody has power over ourselves but us, what we put into our minds is our choice. Self-pity, self-depreciation, insecurity, all these are mental states; they are but pits dug up by nobody else but ourselves, by our very hands. You dictate who you are, not what people say about you. The house of seven gables is a good read, it shows certain tendencies of the human state that can be improved upon, and it exposes qualities especially regarding lineage and folklore that can be outlived. It shows that the power of the past is but a choice, whether we acknowledge its ruling power or not is a decision made by the present. As with anything else, it has it shares of faults. It gives too much faith on mesmerism and hypnotism despite its alleged aim to disprove myths and curses. Also, it did not live up to certain expectations. The first chapter promised something of an epic sweeping across generations, but the novel only focused on one generation and showed but glimpses of others. I was under the impression of something like of one hundred years of solitude; I got but barely a year. And, sometimes I am given the impression that Hawthorne distrusts his reader’s intellectual capacity. Especially with regards to the chapter entitled “Governor Pyncheon”, he expects his reader to be clueless about a very obvious fact. Of course, this might be considered as style; nevertheless I disliked the treatment on my part. Considering all elements of the book, I can still say that it is worth the time I gave it. The novel ends on a positive note and its optimism despite all its precedent darkness gives light to Hawthorne’s romanticism and virtuosity. In the end, I would like to note that should I sum up the nuggets of wisdom imparted by this book by a sentence, it would read as thus: Live by your own accord, then let others live by theirs.
I can see why English teachers like this book. The vocabulary alone makes it worth reading. Plus it's full of all that theme and symbolism that English teachers love to talk about.Unfortunately, Nathaniel Hawthorne liked to talk about theme and symbolism too, which makes this book feel like one long treatise on theme and symbolism. I mean, seriously, Nathaniel Hawthorne goes on and on and on and then on some more about the stuff. He doesn't just tell you once that it is a degradation that Hepzibah has to set up shop or that Judge Pyncheon is evil. He beats you over the head with it. Which makes me wonder--did Nathaniel Hawthorne think his readers were stupid? Did he think people were going to read about Judge Pyncheon threatening to put Clifford in an asylum and think, "Hmmm, I wonder if he's the villain?"What Hawthorne didn't make clear was the plot. After dragging us through so many soliloquies about human nature, greed, sins of the fathers, class decay, the benefits of trains, and apparently any other topic that crossed his mind while he was writing, he wraps up the plot so quickly and carelessly that the reader is left to wonder what in the world happened.*Spoiler Alert*Judge Pyncheon dies while threatening Clifford and we are left to believe that Clifford kills him, because after all, Clifford is kind of crazy and Hawthorne has been hinting for the last hundred pages or so that Judge Pyncheon has something to do with Clifford being sent to jail for the last thirty years. Clifford and Hepzibah flee the town and get on a train.Phoebe and Holgrave find the dead judge, but instead of assuming that Holgrave has been murdered (He has a bloody spot on his chest) by one of the fleeing pair, Holgrave tells Phoebe that he has taken a picture of the Judge (well, who wouldn’t?) and has compared it to the Judge’s picture and somehow this proves Clifford’s innocence. How you may ask? Hawthorne doesn’t tell us.Just like he doesn’t tell us why Clifford and Hepzibah return from their train ride when surely they know they will be blamed for the death of the judge.But they’re not. Hawthorn just glosses over anything else about the townsfolk’s reaction to the Judge’s death. I mean, he is found dead in a chair in the house of those he has wronged with a blood stain on his shirt, but somehow nobody seems to think foul play is involved because Clifford conveniently inherits the Judge’s wealth and they move.Um, yeah.I would maybe care about all of those themes that Hawthorne is pushing on the reader, but I can’t care about them when the plot doesn’t work.
What do You think about The House Of The Seven Gables (2005)?
Just a quick comment about Hawthorne's claim this is a "romance". Many posts here misunderstand the author's definition of the word romance, thinking he means the kind of book found in the romance section of the modern bookstore that includes Nora Roberts and the like. This is NOT the kind of romance the author is claiming for this novel. More closely akin to what Hawthorne means for the modern reader would be "fantasy", that is, not a story of realism, but arising from a creative liberty which may dispense with realism in order to draw forth that which can only be revealed by looking through the real to something like what Wordsworth termed, "something more deeply interfused" within the real and revealed only by the imagination. Wordsworth was a "Romantic" poet. So was Keats who said, "I am certain of nothing but the truth of the imagination and the holiness of the heart's affection." So, if you read this expecting Danielle Steel and were disappointed, it wasn't the author who misled you, it was modern book publishers by limiting that section of the bookstore to a very particular kind of "Romance".
—Gkc3of9
The House of the Seven Gables begins with a preface by the author that identifies the work as a romance, not a novel. That may be the author's preference, but I think most romance fans will be disappointed if they read this book. The book is a classic by a famous American author, so it deserves to be read. Once you finish the book and look over the complete plot, you can see how romantic love has healed a 200-year family curse. Therefore, in that regard it is a romance. However, the experience of reading the book is more like wondering through a dreary haunted labyrinth. I did not find it enjoyable to read. I suppose the book can be considered a parable with a message aimed at the stiff necked 19th Century New England descendants of the Puritans. They are a people who behave in proper ways, but have an ancestral history of executing their neighbors on trumped up charges of witchcraft. They are haunted by a secret guilt of association because of the actions of their ancestors. The story told by this book is about the Pyncheon family that parallels this New England story at large.The book's narrative comes as close as possible to being a ghost story while still remaining within the world of realism. I can imagine that a reader who believes in ghosts can come away from this story with the impression that it is indeed about ghosts. Likewise, another reader who doesn't believe in ghosts will say the story is about people who suspect that there may be ghosts in their lives who are intent on mischief. Either way Nathaniel Hawthorne skillfully weaves a family story filled with angst.One feature of the book that surprised me was the role of Mesmerism (today we call it hypnotism). As described in this book it appears to be occult magic. Likewise, a lot of the melancholia described in this book would today be called clinical depression. Thank goodness for the character of Phoebe in the story. Her young sunny disposition is a breath of fresh air into an otherwise dreary environment. She’s a reminder of the eternal possibility of renewal brought by young people to human society.
—Clif Hostetler
When I finished this story, I found it hard to care about it. It is my least favorite of Hawthorne's books. The characters were mostly unlikable, the plodding plot fattened up with many pages of useless description that added nothing. It was a relief to be done with it, an achievement that can only be attributed to my stubborn refusal to stop reading once engaged, no matter how annoying the material. :o) It does feel irreverent to be trashing Nathaniel Hawthorne. But time would be better spent reading his other masterpieces.
—Christie
