The House of the Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne's

The House of the Seven Gables by Darlene Bennett Morris, Ph.D.

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Editor: Gary Carey, M.A., University of Colorado Consulting Editor: James L. Roberts, Ph.D., Department of English, University of Nebraska CliffsNotes™ The House of the Seven Gables Published by: Hungry Minds, Inc. 909 Third Avenue New York, NY 10022 www.hungryminds.com (Hungry Minds Web site) www.cliffsnotes.com (CliffsNotes Web site) Copyright© 1984 Hungry Minds, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book, including interior design, cover design, and icons, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 0-8220-0595-6 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Distributed in the United States by Hungry Minds, Inc. Distributed by CDG Books Canada Inc. for Canada; by Transworld Publishers Limited in the United Kingdom; by IDG Norge Books for Norway; by IDG Sweden Books for Sweden; by IDG Books Australia Publishing Corporation Pty. Ltd. for Australia and New Zealand; by TransQuest Publishers Pte Ltd. for Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong; by Gotop Information Inc. for Taiwan; by ICG Muse, Inc. for Japan; by Norma Comunicaciones S.A. for Columbia; by Intersoft for South Africa; by Eyrolles for France; by International Thomson Publishing for Germany, Austria and Switzerland; by Distribuidora Cuspide for Argentina; by LR International for Brazil; by Galileo Libros for Chile; by Ediciones ZETA S.C.R. Ltda. for Peru; by WS Computer Publishing Corporation, Inc., for the Philippines; by Contemporanea de Ediciones for Venezuela; by Express Computer Distributors for the Caribbean and West Indies; by Micronesia Media Distributor, Inc. for Micronesia; by Grupo Editorial Norma S.A. for Guatemala; by Chips Computadoras S.A. de C.V. for Mexico; by Editorial Norma de Panama S.A. for Panama; by American Bookshops for Finland. Authorized Sales Agent: Anthony Rudkin Associates for the Middle East and North Africa. For general information on Hungry Minds’ products and services please contact our Customer Care department; within the U.S. at 800-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993 or fax 317-572-4002. For sales inquiries and resellers information, including discounts, premium and bulk quantity sales and foreign language translations please contact our Customer Care department at 800-434-3422, fax 317-572-4002 or write to Hungry Minds, Inc., Attn: Customer Care department, 10475 Crosspoint Boulevard, Indianapolis, IN 46256. For information on licensing foreign or domestic rights, please contact our Sub-Rights Customer Care department at 650-653-7098. For information on using Hungry Minds’ products and services in the classroom or for ordering examination copies, please contact our Educational Sales department at 800-434-2086 or fax 317-572-4005. Please contact our Public Relations department at 212-884-5163 for press review copies or 212-884-5000 for author interviews and other publicity information or fax 212-884-5400. For authorization to photocopy items for corporate, personal, or educational use, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, or fax 978-750-4470. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR HAVE USED THEIR BEST EFFORTS IN PREPARING THIS BOOK. THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THERE ARE NO WARRANTIES WHICH EXTEND BEYOND THE DESCRIPTIONS CONTAINED IN THIS PARAGRAPH. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES REPRESENTATIVES OR WRITTEN SALES MATERIALS. THE ACCURACY AND COMPLETENESS OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED HEREIN AND THE OPINIONS STATED HEREIN ARE NOT GUARANTEED OR WARRANTED TO PRODUCE ANY PARTICULAR RESULTS, AND THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY INDIVIDUAL. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFIT OR ANY OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR OTHER DAMAGES. FULFILLMENT OF EACH COUPON OFFER IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE OFFEROR. Trademarks: Cliffs, CliffsNotes, the CliffsNotes logo, CliffsAP, CliffsComplete, CliffsTestPrep, CliffsQuickReview,

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CONTENTS Life of the Author A Chronology of Hawthorne's Life Introduction to the Novel Hawthorne's Preface General Plot Summary List of Characters Summaries and Critical Commentaries Character Analyses Hawthorne's Use of Symbols Suggested Essay Topics Selected Bibliography

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LIFE OF THE AUTHOR Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, came from old New England stock; in fact, one of his ancestors was a judge during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692–93. (Hawthorne's feelings in this matter are part of the story of The House of the Seven Gables.) For several generations, Hawthorne's paternal ancestors followed the sea, while the family declined in wealth and social importance; his father, Captain Hathorne (Hawthorne added the w to the spelling of the family name after he graduated from college), died at Surinam, Dutch Guiana, when his son was four years old. The boy was brought up in the households of his mother's family in Salem and in the back country of Maine. He was sent to Bowdoin College by his uncles. When he was graduated in 1825, Hawthorne determined to become a writer of fiction. For more than a decade he devoted himself to learning his craft, living at the family home, reading much, writing much, destroying many of his productions, but sending some of his stories to magazines and the popular "annuals," the Christmas gift-books of the time. These early works were published anonymously. After some ventures in editing and literary hackwork under-taken in an effort to support himself—the many stories he published in these years brought him little income—and after a brief period of employment in the Boston Custom House and another period as a member of the experimental socialist community at Brook Farm, Hawthorne married, at the age of thirty-eight, Miss Sophia Peabody. Thereafter, anticipating the later American pattern, he was never to have a home which he could think of as permanent. Several happy years in the Old Manse in Concord (Emerson's ancestral home) brought him into contact with Emerson and Thoreau. Later, back in Salem again, he was employed as a Surveyor in the Salem Custom House until, losing his job for political reasons, he tried the experiment of devoting himself wholly to literature. He wrote The Scarlet Letter very quickly, following it soon after with The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and other works. In Lenox, in the Berkshires, lie formed what is for us his most significant literary friendship when he became a neighbor of Herman Melville, then at work on Moby Dick, which Melville dedicated to Hawthorne. For seven years, Hawthorne was abroad, in England, where he tried to solve his financial problems by serving as United States Consul in Liverpool, and in Italy, adding The House of the Seven Gables 5

steadily to his notebooks but unable to do any creative work until, at the end of his stay, he wrote The Marble Faun. Returning to Concord in 1860, he died after four unhappy years during which, working against failing health and flagging creative energies which were probably attributable to a breakdown of his psychic health, he tried to bring to satisfactory conclusions several late romances which he left unfinished at his death.

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A CHRONOLOGY OF HAWTHORNE'S LIFE 1804

Nathaniel Hawthorne born July 4, on Union Street, Salem, Massachusetts, second of three children and only son of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Manning Hathorne; descended on both sides from prominent New England ancestors.

1808

Death of his father, a sea captain, at Surinam, in Dutch Guiana, leaving a widow and children partially dependent on her relatives, the Mannings.

1821

Attended Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce were his classmates.

1825

Graduated from Bowdoin College and returned to the "chamber under the eaves" in his mother's house in Salem and spent a dozen years in relative seclusion, reading and writing, rather than entering a trade or profession as was expected of him.

1828

Published Fanshawe: A Tale, anonymously and at his own expense; later recalled the book, which was based on many of his experiences at Bowdoin College, and he destroyed all the copies he could locate.

1830

Published in the Salem Gazette his first story, "The Hollow of the Three Hills."

1830-37

Wrote tales and sketches which appeared in newspapers, magazines, and especially The Token, an annual published by Samuel Griswold Goodrich.

1837

From March through August, edited The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge at Boston; with the help of his sister Elizabeth, he wrote or excerpted from books and periodicals the matter required to fill each monthly issue.

1838

Published Peter Parley's Universal History, which he wrote, again with Elizabeth's help, for the Peter Parley series issued by Samuel Griswold Goodrich; brought out a collection of eighteen stories and sketches in Twice-Told Tales, for which his Bowdoin classmate Horatio Bridge guaranteed the publishers against loss.

1839

Became engaged to marry Sophia Peabody, the semi-invalid daughter of Dr. Nathaniel and Amelia Peabody, and sister of Elizabeth, a teacher and a pioneer in the development of The House of the Seven Gables 7

kindergartens, and sister of Mary Tyler, who became the wife of educator Horace Mann. 1839-40

Worked as a Measurer in the Boston Custom House; wrote very little in these years except for the entries in his notebook.

1841

Published Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree, composed of historical and biographical accounts written for children; joined the Brook Farm Community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in April, where he hoped to provide a home and a living for Sophia and also to reserve time for his writing.

1842

Published an expanded edition of Twice-Told Tales in two volumes and Biographical Stories; was married on July 9 to Sophia Peabody at Boston, a marriage which proved to be idyllic.

1842-45

Lived at the Old Manse, Concord, where he had as neighbors and associates Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Amos Bronson Alcott; wrote sketches and tales, "allegories of the heart," many of which were published in the Democratic Review.

1846

Published Moses from an Old Manse; his son Julian was born on June 22.

1846-49

Worked as Surveyor in the Salem Custom House; his mother died while he was writing The Scarlet Letter.

1850

Published The Scarlet Letter, which won him considerable fame.

1850-51

Lived in the Red House, Lennox, Massachusetts, where he had Herman Melville as a neighbor and eager visitor.

1851

Published The House of the Seven Gables, The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales, and True Stories from History and Biography; his daughter Rose was born on May 20.

1852

Published The Blithedale Romance, which reflected in great detail his experiences at Brook Farm; also published A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and the campaign biography of Franklin Pierce.

1853

Published Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys.

1853-57

Appointed by President Pierce to serve as United States Consul at Liverpool.

1857-59

Lived in Rome and Florence; frequented the art museums and wrote expanded notebook entries which he later reworked for inclusion in The Marble Faun. The House of the Seven Gables 8

1860

Published The Marble Faun, his last completed work of fiction; strove in vain to finish another romance and at his death left four fragments: Dr. Grimshaw's Secret, Septimus Felton, The Ancestral Footstep, and The Dolliver Romance.

1863

Published Our Old Home in December, which contains a series of essays on England and English-American relations.

1864

On April 10, was shaken by the death of his friend W. D. Tichnor; on May 11, accompanied Franklin Pierce to New Hampshire in search of improved health; on May 18, died at Plymouth, New Hampshire; on May 23, was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL About six months after the publication of The Scarlet Letter on March 16, 1850, Hawthorne began writing The House of the Seven Gables. On January 12, 1851, it was finished, and Hawthorne said he preferred it to the earlier romance. However, neither the general reading public nor the literary critics, it has turned out, agreed with him. The Scarlet Letter has, almost from the beginning, outsold The House of the Seven Gables and has evoked a massive number of critical essays that the latter will probably never approach. Nevertheless, The House of the Seven Gables has continued to hold a fascination for both readers and critics because of its richness. The variety of ways in which The House of the Seven Gables has been interpreted by perceptive critics is a clue to that richness. The novel has been read as a parable on the nature and effects of Original Sin. It has been read as a more nearly complete working out of the theme of Hawthorne's short story "Lady Eleanor's Mantle"—that is, that pride and death arc inseparable companions: they sit together in the darkening room that is at once the heart of the old Pyncheon house and the tomb of judge Jaffrey's ambitions. The novel has been read as the most impressive artistic statement of Hawthorne's democratic beliefs; according to this reading, the aristocratic Pyncheons discover that death and suffering are no respecters of persons and that they, the Pyncheons, must give up their pretensions to superiority and mingle with "the common people" and, in particular, the The House of the Seven Gables 9

"common" Maules. The House of the Seven Gables has been read as a statement of the archetypal theme of withdrawal and return, which Hawthorne interpreted as isolation and redemptive reunion. It has also been read as Hawthorne's maturest statement on man's relationship to the past, considered as determinative for the future, and on whether, or how, man can escape from the bondage which the past imposes. It has also been read as a piece of charmingly poetic realism, a sort of forerunner of the "local color" tales of old New England that were so popular after the Civil War. The House of the Seven Gables can engage the reader successfully either in its love story, its picturesque Salem history, its Yankee humor, its romantic legend, its modern realism, its melodrama, or even its few moments of gothic terror. In order to take a sufficiently inclusive view of The House of the Seven Gables, we must both examine and look beyond even Hawthorne's own surface emphasis; the author does mean what he says about his characters and their doings, but his deeper hints of characterization, his imagery, and the direction of his plot all bespeak an overriding concern with something of importance for all of us who read the novel.

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HAWTHORNE'S PREFACE When Hawthorne defined his purpose as a writer of "romances," his first care was to distinguish the romance from the novel. After we finish reading his definition of a novel, as opposed to a romance, we get the feeling that Hawthorne was groping toward a conception of fiction that was more unique than he realized. Others before him, from Henry Fielding on, had wondered where to place fiction among the several kinds of literature, but Hawthorne's emphasis on fiction as an art form, his insistence that it be tested by laws appropriate to its mode of existence rather than to its accuracy as a document, clearly establishes a sound critical principle for distinguishing the novel from a romance. Other critics such as Henry James, who wrote a critical book on Hawthorne, elaborates upon the distinction, but, here, Hawthorne's choice of an analogy is particularly relevant to his argument. But most important of all to Hawthorne's distinction between a romance and a novel is his life-long insistence that the kind of truth which he wanted to portray was the "truth of the human heart," and that the best way to portray this was by using the strategy of indirection. The "truth" which he hoped to conceive is of a different order from the truth conveyed by ordinary didactic fiction, by philosophy, or by the symbolism of the exact sciences. It is a truth that can be expressed only in the images of the imagination, and as Hawthorne himself thought, this truth cannot be "grasped" except in such images. The most striking way in which Hawthorne's work foreshadows all modern fiction lies in the mythic and poetic aspects of his novel. When, in the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne made his now famous distinction between the novel and the romance, he was not at all intending to assign "truth" to the novel and mere "fantasy," or escapist dreaming, to the romance. He was distinguishing between "fact" (which the novel deals with) and "truth" (which is the traditional province of the romance), and at the same time he was suggesting an orientation in which "fact" is external and "truth" internal. So far as he was defending, implicitly, the validity of his own. practice as a romancer, he was implying the word "mere" before the word "fact." (He was ambivalent about this, as he so often was on other matters, to be sure. He thought that Emerson was too idealistic, and he greatly admired the"beef and ale" realism of Anthony The House of the Seven Gables 11

Trollope.) The romantic artist creates, Hawthorne thought, by transforming fact into symbol—that is, by transforming it into meaningful fact. Facts which he cannot see as meaningful may be discarded. He is at liberty to manipulate his materials, to shape them freely into meaningful patterns, so long as he does not violate the "truth of the human heart." Hawthorne felt that he himself could best pursue his desired truth by looking within and exercising a kind of imaginative sympathy in both his subject and his method. In a very suggestive metaphor in another of his prefaces—that to The Snow-Image and Other TwiceTold Tales in 1851—he defined his role as an artist as that of a person who has been burrowing into the depths of human nature by the light of observation. In addition to his theory of fiction, Hawthorne also tells us the subject of The House of the Seven Gables; that theme, he says, is that wrong and retribution, as well as sin and suffering, will be carried on through generations. He further announces that he will observe how the wrongdoing of one generation lives into successive generations until it finally becomes a "pure and uncontrollable mischief." In an even more serious tone, he adds that he hopes that this work might warn mankind against accumulating "ill-gotten gold, or real estate," and bequeathing them to later, innocent generations. The romance provides, then, in Hawthorne's view of the matter, texts for sermons on the sins of pride and avarice and on the fact of mutability. The novel, on the other hand, presents us with the "legendary mist" of the distant past, intermingling with the memories of the recent past, especially in the minds of the House of the Seven Gable's inhabitants. Hawthorne combines his conviction about the continuum of history and about the interdependence of person and place into a complex idea of a self extended in time, in space, and through its own layered awareness. Within that self, the past intrudes on the present as the subconscious intrudes on the conscious. In this sense, the novel presents the old Pyncheon house, haunted by the guilt of the founder and the ghost of his victim. Hawthorne knows that what he wants to say cannot be said wholly in the Preface; thus, here he comments more freely on his intentions in the work than was customary with him, and then he The House of the Seven Gables 12

tells us to read the novel attentively if we would know its meaning.

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GENERAL PLOT SUMMARY The House of the Seven Gables, once a "show place" in a small New England town, now presents little evidence of its former grandeur. Wind, sun, storm, and neglect left its sides, shingles, and chimney crumbling. Its gray look is mottled here and there with moss. The lattice fence surrounding it is in ruin. The lawn in front, and what must have been a spacious garden at the rear, long since have missed the care of the cultivator's hand. There in front, to the right of the imposing entrance, is a small door adjacent to a window of what obviously was once a shop. The house reflects the unfortunate circumstances under which it was built some 160 years before by Colonel Pyncheon, one of the early Puritan settlers on the bleak New England coast. The site upon which the house stood originally belonged to a man of poor circumstances named Matthew Maule. In the center of the site was a wonderful spring of sweet flowing water. Colonel Pyncheon would build his mansion on no other site. To obtain it he was instrumental in Matthew Maule's being charged with witchcraft, for which Maule was hanged. On the gallows, Maule cried out that the Pyncheons would forever be cursed. No sooner had the cruel and grasping Colonel Pyncheon completed his beautiful and imposing House of the Seven Gables than he died of a strange death on the very day the townspeople had been invited to its opening. The curse of Matthew Maule, some said, persists in plaguing the old house and its inhabitants. Now over a century and a half later, the sole family member inhabiting the old place is Hepzibah Pyncheon, an aging old maid. There is also a Mr. Holgrave, a daguerreotypist and artist, who rents upstairs apartments. One day a pretty young girl arrives at the old house; she is Phoebe Pyncheon. Hepzibah is impressed with her niece's cheerful, wholesome, and helpful disposition and permits her to stay for a week or two. Somehow, despite the cavernous darkness of the old mansion, Phoebe manages to lighten the gloom. Before Phoebe's arrival, Hepzibah had set aside what pride was left to the family and opened up a "one cent" shop. At about this time, Hepzibah's brother Clifford arrives to make The House of the Seven Gables 14

his home there. This poor, aging man seems to have the intellect of a child. Hepzibah's loving effort to restore her brother's health is futile. Phoebe then takes over, and Clifford seems to respond to the young girl's care. The old mansion reverts to its gloom, however, when Phoebe ends her visit and returns to her farm home. At about this time, judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, a wealthy man of the town who lives in a palatial country place, visits Hepzibah and demands to see Clifford. Hepzibah steadfastly refuses, but one day the judge says that he must see Clifford or institute proceedings to have him committed to an insane asylum. Clifford, says the judge, knows of the whereabouts of documents which will give the judge possession of a vast tract of land to the east in Maine. Hepzibah finally relents and ushers the judge into the parlor where he sits down, with watch in hand, to impatiently await the arrival of Clifford from his upstairs chamber. Hepzibah finds Clifford's chamber empty and frantically races downstairs to beg the judge to help find him. But there, in the parlor, stands Clifford in a wild state of excitement pointing at the judge's dead figure sitting in the chair. Hepzibah and Clifford flee to the railroad station and board a train just ready to leave. Impulsively, Clifford and Hepzibah later leave the train at a deserted railway station many miles from the House of the Seven Gables. Phoebe returns to the old mansion, now strangely silent, and locked shut. Holgrave admits her and informs her of the judge's strange death. He begs Phoebe to give him a moment more before she calls the sheriff. He recalls the many pleasant hours they spent in the garden on her first visit, when he confessed his love for her. She confesses she is in love with him. At that moment, Clifford and Hepzibah return. Subsequently the judge's wealth is inherited by Phoebe, Clifford, and Hepzibah. Examination of the judge's past suggests that he knew the circumstances of his rich uncle's death, and that he was responsible for Clifford's being imprisoned for the uncle's murder. Phoebe and Holgrave, who now confesses he was the last descendant of Matthew Maule, are pledged to be wed. With some regret, but with greater joy, they pack their belongings and go to the judge's country place. The old house is left to its sad and tragic The House of the Seven Gables 15

memories.

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LIST OF CHARACTERS Hepzibah Pyncheon The sixty-year-old spinster cousin of judge Jaffrey Pyncheon and of Phoebe's father; she is a kinsman to Phoebe; she has been granted the right to reside in the House of the Seven Gables during the remainder of her lifetime; she has Holgrave as a roomer, opens the centshop, but scowls most of her customers away; she cares only for her partly demented brother Clifford. Clifford Pyncheon The nephew of the deceased bachelor Jaffrey Pyncheon, whose death by natural causes Clifford is unjustly blamed for—through the machinations of his cousin judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. Following a thirtyyear imprisonment, Clifford is released and begins to live with his spinster sister, Hepzibah Pyncheon; he retains his love of beauty even though his faculties are ruined; he is tenderly cared for by Hepzibah and Phoebe. Phoebe Pyncheon The seventeen-year-old country cousin of Hepzibah, Clifford, and judge Jaffrey; she is lovely and sunny, but intellectually shallow. She marries Holgrave at the end of the novel. Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon The hypocritical, smiling villain who causes his cousin Clifford's imprisonment and tortures him in an effort to locate missing evidence of Pyncheon family rights to Indian lands; he dies alone in the parlor of the House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave The twenty-one-year-old daguerreotypist (photographer) who rooms in the seven-gabled Pyncheon house; he resists using his hypnotic powers on Phoebe Pyncheon (whom he ultimately marries); he has radical notions, but, ironically, he becomes conservative. He is really a Maule—descended from Matthew Maule, who ruinously hypnotized Alice Pyncheon. Uncle Venner The old rheumatic laborer who is full of pithy philosophy; instead of going to the workhouse, he joins Hepzibah, Clifford, Phoebe, and Holgrave when they move to the late judge Jaffrey's country estate. The House of the Seven Gables 17

Ned Higgins The little boy who often begs cookies from Hepzibah's cent-shop. Matthew Maule The accused 'wizard' whose house-site Colonel Pyncheon covets; when he is about to be hanged for witchcraft, he curses the Pyncheon family. He is the father of Thomas Maule, the builder of the House of the Seven Gables. Matthew Maule A carpenter, and the only grandson of Matthew Maule, the 'wizard.' He is summoned by Gcrvayse Pyncheon thirty-seven years after the house is built. He ruinously hypnotizes that proud man's daughter, Alice Pyncheon. Alice Pyncheon The Europeanized daughter of Gervayse who plants some flower seeds brought from Europe; she plays the harpsichord. She is ruinously mesmerized by Matthew Maule, the grandson carpenter of the 'wizard' Maule; she catches a fatal cold after Matthew Maule's wedding. She is Phoebe Pyncheon's great-great aunt. Colonel Pyncheon The original Pyncheon; he covets Matthew Maule's house-site and contributes to the condemnation of the 'wizard' for witchcraft in order to seize the land and build the seven-gabled Pyncheon house on it; his corpse greets the first guests entering the new house. He is the great -great -great-grandfather of judge Jaffrey, Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe's father. It is his gloomy portrait which hangs in the parlor of the house. Jaffrey Pyncheon The bachelor uncle of judge Jaffrey, Clifford, Hepzibah, and Arthur Pyncheon; he dies of a seizure while observing the young judge Jaffrey ransacking his desk for papers and money; his death was attributed to Clifford, who was therefore unjustly imprisoned for thirty years. Scipio Gervayse Pyncheon's Negro servant.

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SUMMARIES AND COMMENTARIES Chapter 1 Summary On one of the side streets of a New England town stands a seven gabled house with an enormous elm tree before its door. It is the ancestral Pyncheon house, owned by a family with a long tradition. It was built on the site of the house of Matthew Maule. Envious of the fine location, Colonel Pyncheon had helped convict the house's owner of witchcraft and was instrumental in having him hanged. From the gallows, however, Matthew Maulc cursed Colonel Pyncheon: "God will give him blood to drink!" Later, on the day that the Colonel opened his new seven-gabled mansion, a hundred sixty years ago, his guests found him dead in his study, his ruff and beard smeared red with blood. Generations of Pyncheons have come and gone, and the family has suffered many sorrows; a claim to an extensive tract of land in Maine remains unsubstantiated; a Pynchcon turned Tory during the Revolution, but he repented in time to save the house from confiscation; and a cousin of the present leading Pyncheon, judge Jaffrey, has been convicted of murdering his uncle and has been sent to prison. The present inhabitant of the house, Miss Hcpzibah Pyncheon, has reopened its dusty little cent-shop. The descendants of Maule seem to have disappeared, although one, Matthew's son Thomas, superintended the building of the Pyncheon house, which has a brow-like second story, a murky, sour well, a weedy garden, mossy windows, and flowers in a high nook near the chimney. Commentary The opening sentences of this novel are worth noting for their many details. In view of Hawthorne's habit of using only details that are most significant, certain images should be noted here. The novel involves the story of a house that was built by pride and possessed by death on the very day of the housewarming. Thus, the opening description stresses the darkness and angularity of the house and the "wide circumference" of the giant tree that is later said to "overshadow" it. As the house and its inhabitants have decayed, the elm tree has grown almost as though it were nourished by the decay of the The House of the Seven Gables 19

Pynchcon family. The once proud prosperity of the Pyncheons has given way to poverty for most of the family and the original injustice of old Colonel Pyncheon has descended as retribution upon the present inhabitants. The elm has grown with each season, but the inhabitants of the house have become stunted. The same things have happened over and over again, but the Pyncheons do not see that retribution has been a continuing curse upon them because their vision is taken up with the more obvious reality of their great house and the social position of which it is a symbol. Consequently, this blindness to reality is presented in Hepzibah's near-sightedness. The house is a setting for the novel, it is a symbol, and it is also a character in the novel; in fact; it is the protagonist in a drama of good and evil. The street is its antagonist. The realization that the house is a "character" is found in a set of images which personify the House of the Seven Gables. The outward appearance of the house, we are told, reminds one of a human face. The interior, especially the great chimney in the center, is repeatedly presented in the novel in terms of heart imagery. There is a certain suggestion in the novel, though, that the humanity and dignity of the house are inseparable from its troubles; this suggestion is found in the contrasting images of light and dark. Although storm and sunshine have constituted the history of the house, the darkness of the ominous storm is prevalent, as "the venerable mansion . . . grew black in the eastwind." This darkness is early foreshadowed. Hawthorne describes how the terror and ugliness of Maule's crime "darkened" the freshly painted walls of the house until it became a gray, feudal castle. The projecting upper stories cast "shadowed frowns"; darkness, in fact, penetrates the house very soon indeed, especially in the character of Colonel Pyncheon, wearing in death "a frown on his dark and massive countenance." Here, from the very beginning of the novel, the dark frown of the house is compared to the dark frown of its many occupants. The Colonel's death is coupled with the mysterious disappearance of the Pyncheon deed and the vast eastern tract of lands and the subsequent obsession of his descendants with their The House of the Seven Gables 20

claim to this vast territory in Maine. This becomes an absurd delusion of family importance, an obsession which sets the house and its inhabitants apart from "the street"—that is, from the society outside the house. Through all the generations, the portrait of the Colonel has brooded over the house, its features seeming to mingle with the sunshine of the passing hour. From the beginning of the novel, we are told that nothing beautiful and "good" will ever grow around the House of the Seven Gables, even though many critics have seen "Alice's posies" (which we will discuss later) as a symbol of renewal. The combination of the light-dark imagery and the growthnon-growth imagery is still seen long after the Colonel's death, when his successor tries to rehabilitate the family. The irony continues as the unlucky descendants of Matthew Maule, long immersed in obscurity and darkness, seem to have disappeared forever. But there is a tradition that "these plebian Maules" have exercised a strange ascendancy over their Pyncheon oppressors in the world of dreams.

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Chapters 2–4 Summary Early one morning, Hepzibah, who according to the previous owner's will can live in the house as long as she wishes, arises, gazes at the miniature portrait of a delicate young man, and then goes into a paneled old room with a faded carpet, tables, a highbacked chair, and the portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon, to which she presents her habitual near-sighted scowl. Unable to sew or teach school, she must now earn her living here. With a deep sigh, the old spinster reluctantly opens the cent-shop, now filled with flour, apples, soap, candles, dried vegetables, candy, gingerbread men, lead soldiers, matches, and the like. The town stirs; the old spinster seems simultaneously ludicrous and pathetic. Her first customer is Holgrave, the daguerreotypist (or photographer) who rents a part of the vast old Pyncheon house. When Hepzibah breaks down and cries, he comforts her by telling her that she is now a heroic part of the great working public, and then he asks for some biscuits, which she gives him without allowing him to pay. Afterward, a boy, Ned Higgins, comes to get a Jim Crow cookie, for which she does not charge him; but when he returns for another, she demands his penny. It is done. She is now a tradeswoman. She feels a curious thrill—almost a feeling of joy. But her day is mixed—pessimistic and curious customers loiter, or else they enter to observe her. When a rich woman passes, Hepzibah is tempted to curse her, but then she repents and scowls instead. The day continues. Hepzibah's rich cousin, judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, walks by, well dressed but no longer handsome, with an unpleasant smile, and he looks disapprovingly at her shop but then smiles broadly when he sees her. Hepzibah notes that he resembles their Puritan ancestor's portrait hanging in the house's living room, which she now visits. She begins to think of her brother, Clifford, persecuted because of the soft traits in him that he inherited from their soft-hearted mother. Returning to her shop, she sees old Uncle Venner, a kindly fellow with a fund of wisdom who talks of his ultimate retirement to his "farm"—in reality, the workhouse. He advises Hepzibah to smile at her customers, and then he cautiously asks when "he" (Clifford) is expected home. When Uncle Venner leaves, Hepzibah feels sad and confused; she gives wrong change, and she welcomes the end of her first commercial day, even The House of the Seven Gables 22

though her profit amounts to only a few coppers. As she is locking the door of the cent-shop, Hepzibah notices an omnibus drawing up to the front of the house, and out steps a pretty young girl with a trunk. Hepzibah, peering from out of the darkness, recognizes the young lady as Phoebe, a kinsperson from the country, whose letter announcing her arrival has been overlooked in the postman's pocket for four or five days. Commentary The second chapter presents a picture of Hepzibah at dawn on the day that she must perform the dreaded task of opening a shop, of becoming a "tradesperson." Dawn, the traditional symbol of new beginnings, holds no positive meaning for this old woman who has shut herself up in her house, completely apart from "the business of life." The very crossing of the threshold of her own bedroom door is a crucial moment, a daring act. Shut away from the world and the sun, her black mood and her scowl have come to define her. And even though her heart never "frowns," even though it is tender and sensitive, it is full of little tremors and palpitations that are called weaknesses. Her scowl and her sternness, significantly, also belonged to the Colonel, the original Pyncheon, as they now belong to the judge, the present leading Pyncheon, although the judge takes care to conceal these ominous indications of his true nature. As Hepzibah comes into her shop to arrange her "wares" for the first time, there is a deeply tragic sense that contrasts greatly with the "ludicrous pettiness of her employment." The novel's narrative actually begins in Chapter 3, "The First Customer," when Hepzibah has to face the sunlight of everyday reality. Darkness, we see, is the emblematic "color" of the Pyncheons, and contrasted—with its opposite, light—it forms one of the major symbols of the novel: the opposition of dark and light. The two images are opposed as shadow and sunshine, as frown and smile, and as Pyncheon portrait and sunlit daguerreotype. At the first ring of the shop bell, Hepzibah rises, as pale as a ghost; however, it is not a customer but her lodger, Holgrave. Entering from the morning light, "he appears to bring" some of its cheery influence into the shop along with him. Appears is a very important word here, for Holgrave is a Maule and not a true inhabitant of "the street." Early in the first chapter, the narrator The House of the Seven Gables 23

cites the prediction that old Matthew Maule's ghost will haunt the "new apartments" of the Pyncheon house. This prophesy has come true in flesh and blood in the person of Holgrave, who lives in a remote gable of the house, separated from the main portion. Although his real home has been the street, and although his education has been the result of "passing through the thoroughfares of life," he has now cut himself off from the street. However, he really belongs to neither realm—neither to the realm of the house nor to the realm of the street. He is, we must remember, a descendant of Matthew Maule. Therefore, Holgrave does belong, as it were, more to the house than to the street. He, like the inhabitants of the house, has a "dark, high-featured countenance," and a strange gleam of half-hidden sarcasm can be observed behind the kindliness of his manner. As a daguerreotypist, he remarks that he "misuses Heaven's sunshine" by tracing out human features through its "agency." Left to herself, poor Hepzibah reflects upon the darkness of her prospects, with her pitiful little shop pitted against the great thoroughfares of a city, with all its great stores. For her, there is only the dusky old House of the Seven Gables; it is a mirror which contains within it the ghosts of all the past Pyncheons and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of black silk, scowling at the world as it goes by. As light—and especially sunlight—opposes darkness, the street of human activity opposes the dark Pyncheon house and Hepzibah's store. This dark-light image symbolizes the major struggles of the book: death-life, past-present, presentfuture, despair-hope, and prison freedom. That the family makes overtures to the street in order to become part of the world is seen in what Hepzibah has in her cent-shop. She has attempted to adjust to the street by stocking modern and contemporary items. And finally Hepzibah herself takes courage in facing the outside world, and her face is filled with the healthiest glow that she has exhibited for years. Yet when she opens the shop, the despondency of her past life threatens to return like the heavy mass of clouds, obscuring the sky. Towards noon on this day of Hepzibah's ordeal, judge Pyncheon approaches. He is wiping perspiration from his brow, but he seems made of respectability and benevolence, despite the fact that he carries with him a grim darkness, along with his public brightness. He is capable of frowns and smiles alike, and The House of the Seven Gables 24

his expression this morning is "acrid and disagreeable," but it becomes filled with sunny complacency and benevolence when he becomes aware of Hepzibah in her shop window. Yet he passes on, leaving Hepzibah thinking how closely he resembles the ancient portrait of the Colonel, the original Pyncheon. The Colonel's portrait has almost faded into the canvas; even the physical outline and substance are dark. Put him (Jaffrey) in the Colonel's clothes, reflects Hepzibah, and "then let Jaffrey smile as he might -nobody would doubt that it was the old Pyncheon come again!" This fancy, however, is treated as a mere product of her loneliness and isolation: she needs a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane; she needs to mingle with the outside world. It is not entirely Hepzibah's fancy, however. One of the reasons that the Pyncheons and the House of the Seven Gables is degenerating is that they have had so few offsprings; those who were born grew up dissipated and sickly because they have kept their line so pure, and have not allowed many outsiders into the house. The fact that Jaffrey looks like the Colonel, then, is not surprising. The Colonel had but one grandson; the murdered bachelor uncle had no sons, and neither has Clifford; and judge Jaffrey has but one irascible son. Ironically, however (and this is in connection with the observation made by Hepzibah regarding the similarities between the old Colonel and the judge), it has been sexual aggressiveness which has limited the Pyncheon children—and the cane of the judge is, in part, a symbol of this aggression. Colonel Pyncheon, it is said, wore out three wives by the remorseless weight and hardness of his character. The equally animalistic Jaffrey "exhausted" his wife in three or four years. Hawthorne deftly hints at the judge's sexual behavior by describing his contribution to agriculture "through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull." In contrast, there is Clifford, who has "never quaffed [drank from] the cup of passionate love," and Flcpzibah, the "time stricken virgin" who has never known "what love technically means."

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Chapters 5 & 6 Summary The next morning Phoebe awakens, says her prayers, and visits the rose garden where she picks some of the prettiest blossoms. Returning to the house, she meets Hepzibah, who tells her that she has no financial means to keep her and that Phoebe must return home. As they talk, Phoebe enthusiastically maintains that she can earn her own way, and her youthful honesty impresses Hepzibah who then agrees to keep her on. After breakfast, which Phoebe prepares, the shop bell rings, and Phoebe volunteers to tend the shop for the day. Phoebe proves to have an excellent relationship with the customers, and Hepzibah is greatly impressed with the girl's honest and pleasing manner. Hepzibah thinks that Phoebe's practicality must come from her mother's side of the family because it is certainly not a Pyncheon trait. Hcpzibah then shows the girl Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord, and she describes their roomer, Mr. Holgrave, the artist and a practitioner of mesmerism. She expresses her concern over some of his bearded companions but she still likes him well enough to keep him as a renter. Phoebe enters the Pyncheon garden, with its rich old soil and its many plants, all apparently well-tended, its bees and birds, and its diminutive rooster with his two hens and a lone chick. Suddenly Holgrave, who has tended the garden, enters and compliments Phoebe's ability to feed the chickens. He introduces himself as a photographer and shows her a picture of judge Pyncheon which Phoebe, with a shudder, mistakes for a photograph of Colonel Puncheon's portrait. Holgrave bitterly criticizes the judge and comments that a photograph does not lie. He offers to make a portrait of her, then he "yields control of the garden" to her; he will manage the vegetables. Before he leaves, he warns her against the "bewitched water" of Maule's well. When Phoebe goes into Hepzibah's parlor, she senses the presence of another person in a shadowy, withdrawn chair. She goes to the kitchen for matches, and when she returns, Hepzibah kisses her gently and suggests that she retire early. The girl's sleep is troubled. Commentary When Phoebe awakens next morning, she discovers that her room faces the east, where a glow of crimson light comes flooding through the window; above her is a dark, antique canopy, hanging The House of the Seven Gables 26

like a dark cloud. At first glance, Phoebe seems like sunlight itself; her presence seems to transform the darkness of the house like the light of dawn. But she, like Holgrave, cannot wholly redeem the house nor its inhabitants. Whereas Holgrave is given an unused garret and is refused admittance to the rest of the house, Phoebe is given a room on the east, the direction from which has come the fierce wind which has blackened the structure of the house over the years. Phoebe seems to be an innocent girl, exuding energy and prettiness, as well as domestic competence. Her Pyncheon blood will eventually endow her marriage to Holgrave-Maule, because Phoebe is antithetical to most of the Pyncheon traits. (Symbolically, in the Pyncheon garden, as we discover in Chapter 7, there is one perfect rose, with not a spot of blight or mildew on it, and Phoebe discovers it.) This nice girl with her cheerful ways aligns herself with all the symbols of persisting purity amid the general Pyncheon collapse with the singing birds and, above all, with the unpolluted fountain in the garden. She is even able to neutralize the suggestive implications of her very bedroom where "the joy of bridal nights had throbbed itself away." Hepzibah and Clifford, also, are sexually innocent enough; but Phoebe's purity has added thematic weight because she is seen at the brink of womanhood. The "May" and "December" of the chapter's title may point to opposites but may also point to the fact that Phoebe may be closer to Hepzibah than she seems at first glance. Hawthorne deliberately places Phoebe within a sexual perspective and makes her exempt from erotic inclinations. She dreams, but only innocently and cheerfully; she has "brisk impulses," but they urge her to hike in the countryside; her "ordinary little toils" do not register unfulfilled desire but merely "perfect health." She is even observed by Clifford at a moment of emergent sexual appeal, yet she pays for this recognition with nothing more than a maidenly blush and a slight modification of her forthrightness. Phoebe's role is epitomized at one point by the striking oxymoron "homely witchcraft"—that is, a spiritual power combined with a tidy domesticity. In Hawthorne's usual world, this is unthinkable; one can be either a conventional nobody or a moral outlaw with a special potency of spirit. In contrast, Phoebe derives her power of almost unnatural innocence precisely from The House of the Seven Gables 27

her ignorant conventionality—indeed, from her unwillingness to face unpleasant truths. This is especially apparent in her relations with Clifford. She also innocently evades the lecherous Jaffrey's kiss and fails to confirm Hepzibah's original fears that she will be a rival for Clifford's love. She finally confesses that her sentiments toward both Clifford and Hepzibah are maternal. And even though Phoebe is to become the bride of Holgrave at the end of the novel, she is, in fact, a tissue of symbolic contradictions: motherly child, sisterly bride, and an innocent but tempting virgin. Her marriage, then, will seem therapeutic in a world that is "a scene of guilt and retribution more dreadful than the guilt." Phoebe's mixture of character is not unusual, however, in a story which abounds in ambiguous innuendo about both incest and impotence. Thus, for example, Holgrave uses the Pyncheons to illustrate a caution against too prolonged a family dynasty-even though his own "dynasty" is just as long: "In their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another!" And what cannot be uttered about human inbreeding can be said of the family chickens, who are explicit emblems of their owners.

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Chapters 7 & 8 Summary In the morning, Phoebe tenderly helps the nervous and uneasy Hepzibah to prepare an unusually fine breakfast for Clifford, who finally appears in a faded damask gown. This soft, gray-white man is ravenously hungry and is sensually delighted with the food and the flowers which Phoebe presents to him. Since Hepzibah's grief for Clifford has made her seem dark and scowling to his beauty-hungry eyes, Clifford clearly prefers young Phoebe to Hepzibah. He demands that they cover the grim portrait of their ancestral Colonel, and he says that the shop bell is offensive to him, until his sister explains that they must now earn their living, unless they wish to accept charity from "a certain offensive hand" (the judge's). The prison-ruined man bursts into tears and then falls asleep. Hepzibah gazes at him fondly, and then she hastens away. Phoebe learns about the relationship between Hepzibah and Clifford when young Ned Higgins comes for another cookie and identifies the guest as the old woman's brother. Next, judge Pyncheon enters, with his gold-headed cane, gurgling voice, and sultry smile. He is dressed in a black suit, and he is carrying a gold-headed cane of rare, Oriental wood; the latter adds to the high respectability of his presence, as do his snow-white cravat and the conscientious polish of his boots. He has a dark, square face with almost shaggy eyebrows, but he has tried to mitigate the harsh effect by wearing a smile of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. An acute observer would probably suggest that the smile on the judge's face is a good deal like the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his bootblack, respectively, a good deal of hard work to bring out and preserve. As the judge enters Hepzibah's little shop, his smile grows, and upon encountering Phoebe, "a young rosebud of a girl," and learning that she is his relative, he tries to give her a cousinly kiss. Involuntarily, she draws back. Then she sees his smile darken, then brighten, then become almost too intense for her. After Phoebe backs away from this man's attempted kiss, she sees an uncanny resemblance between the heavily sensual man and their colonial ancestor whose portrait so frightened Clifford. On learning that Clifford is now in the house, the judge pushes The House of the Seven Gables 29

past Phoebe to go see him, but Hepzibah bars his progress, refusing him admittance, even though he tries to bribe her with all kinds of luxuries from his country home. He storms, smiles, speaks hypocritically, and when Clifford cries for them to spare him from seeing the judge, the judge leaves. Hepzibah explains to Phoebe that the man is an absolute horror, and the girl sadly begins to believe that evil can "roost" in high places. Commentary Clifford is a wasted, gray, and melancholy figure, and yet his eyes seem to be trying to light the dark corners of the old Pyncheon mansion. Clifford is a man of delicate and exquisite taste, a sybarite who can be satisfied only by harmonious and modulated effects (somewhat like Roderick in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"). Note that Clifford's dressing gown is the same one which he had worn for the youthful portrait which Phoebe has already seen. It is now an old and faded garment, and it is thus a fitting emblem for its wearer and a symbol for the entire Pyncheon family. Two images that appeared earlier in the novel also function in the same way that the gown does: (1) the carpet on the floor in the Colonel's room, where Clifford now resides, was a carpet originally of rich texture; now, it has become worn and faded in these latter years; and (2) the china tea set with its "world of vivid brilliancy [is] . . . still unfaded" because it was brought into the family by one of the Colonel's wives (not a Pyncheon), a Miss Davenport, who was Phoebe's great-great great-great-grandmother. Judge Pyncheon is a combination of excessive and jarring contrasts. Phoebe realizes that the judge is very much like the original of Holgrave's photograph and that the hard, stern, relentless look now on his face is the same one that the sun "had so inflexibly persisted in bringing out." Recovering his poise after Phoebe withdrew from his attempted kiss, the judge beams upon Phoebe once more and she finds herself quite overpowered by his warm, hypocritical smile. Hawthorne re-emphasizes his point with a metaphor that seems almost as if it were from a bestiary. He says that the judge is "very much like a serpent [that] . . . fills the air with his peculiar odor." Confronting the formidable judge herself, poor Hepzibah is transformed by fear. She looks like a dragon; in fact, she takes on the true aspect of judge Pyncheon, which he, in turn, conceals The House of the Seven Gables 30

with a warm, broad smile. The judge's true nature, however, is made evident very shortly. At the sound of Clifford's voice, he becomes a "beast of prey." Hawthorne's words are harsh. He gives us a portrait of a family member who would prey upon another family member, one who has in fact already preyed upon his other family members. But this passage also points to another thing: the fire in the judge's eyes is obviously equated with the hearth in the House of the Seven Gables, tying him to its fate. We have also seen in this chapter that Hepzibah can at least appear as fierce as the judge.

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Chapters 9–11 Summary Since Clifford dislikes Hepzibah's ugliness, rustiness, and scowl, she soon quits reading to him and playing the harpsichord for him, and she sadly and reluctantly (but without jealousy) resigns to Phoebe the task of pleasing him. This pretty young girl, therefore, who is really without true intellectual depth, sings appropriately sad songs to him, yet she also feeds his hunger for beauty. Phoebe is like a daughter to Clifford, and yet he is keenly aware of her virginal bloom. Gradually, she grows pensive and curious, as she naturally would about the cause of his melancholy. Soon a routine is established: while Clifford naps after breakfast, Hepzibah watches him and Phoebe tends the shop; later, the girl entertains him while his sister turns to business. Time passes. In the garden is an old summer house, which Holgrave and Uncle Venner are repairing. In it, Phoebe reads to Clifford, who prefers poetry to romantic fiction. There are also murmuring bees there, redblossomed beans, and hummingbirds to delight Clifford. Hepzibah watches him with tears in her nearsighted eyes. When a hen produces a diminutive egg, she seizes it for his breakfast; their rooster and the hens make up a little rivulet of life for them. Clifford is forever frightened by a "dark face" which he seems to see amid the mosaic-work of pebbles at the bottom of the well. Then the omen disappears. After church on Sunday, the family group often gathers in the old arbor. Clifford enjoys the company of philosophical old Venner, and he hints that he has some mysterious plans for the old man. Holgrave, looking sinister but still admired by Hepzibah for his pleasant manner, smilingly accuses Venner of believing that a community Utopia is possible. Clifford seems happy in the sunlight, yet at twilight, he weeps for a lost happiness. Very simply, he enjoys, most of all, watching the sweeping tide of humanity passing beneath a favorite arched window and balcony of the house. Children, vehicles, peddlers, scissors-grinders, and parades—he is attracted by the sounds of them all. Once he seems so entranced that he seems about to jump from the balcony into the midst of a noisy political procession, but he restrains himself. He says that he wants to attend church. Phoebe has gone on ahead, so he and Hepzibah dress and emerge from their dark door—only to stop, realizing, that it is too late, that they are "ghosts." Once, some time ago, Clifford remembers The House of the Seven Gables 32

blowing soap-bubbles into the street below the arched window; judge Pyncheon came by, frowned when a little bubble burst on his nose, looked up at his cringing cousin and said sarcastically: "What? Still blowing soap-bubbles?" Clifford was panic-stricken. Commentary Hepzibah, overwhelmed by misfortune and by the literal and symbolic shadow of the house, cannot restore to happiness her gloomy, depressed brother, Clifford. She tries to entertain him by reading aloud to him, but her voice is a kind of croak. Thus it falls upon the brightnatured Phoebe to try and rekindle his spirits. She sings to Clifford with sweet naturalness, but her song is tempered with pathos, and thus the situation becomes even more fitting for the situation of Clifford and Hepzibah and "dark misfortune." Here, we should recall that Clifford has been depicted as being almost like a shadow, having an almost inaudible voice. Symptomatically, he dozes every morning, and unless he is accidentally disturbed, he does not emerge from his dense cloud of sleep until noon. It is old Hepzibah's task to watch over his slumbers, but when he wakes, it is young Phoebe's turn to oversee his "brighter hours." In Chapter 10, Clifford is roused by Phoebe and accompanies her to the garden, where Uncle Venner and Holgrave had made such extensive repairs on the roof of the summer-house that it is now a pleasant shelter from sunshine and casual showers, a "green play-piece of flickering light." In this garden retreat—a significant part of the house—as Phoebe reads to Clifford, she is often conscious that his face glows with a more delicate intelligence than even her own. "One glow of this kind," however, is too often (according to Hawthorne) "the precursor of gloom, for many hours afterwards." Clifford seems to be enjoying both a kind of Indian summer with its dividend of sunshine, and at the same time, decay and death. Here, in this mixture of paradoxical influences upon Clifford, we see the mingling of images which mark the antithetical conditions of the Pyncheons. The light of the sun is filtered by the arbor (through flickering light); the garden is a retreat from harsh outside intrusion, yet it is lush with vegetation; Phoebe's readings are poetic rather than revealing the fictional adventures of people in the outside world; the cycles of nature are around the summerhouse which Holgrave (a Maule) and Uncle Venner have The House of the Seven Gables 33

reconstructed; the influence of summer-house and garden is that of an Indian summer, but it is an atmosphere not only of happy brightness but also one of deadly decadence as well. Clifford's escape from the Pyncheon curse is thus qualified and transient. Clifford likes to contemplate Maule's well; he enjoys looking down at the constantly shifting kaleidoscope of figures, produced by the "flowing water over the mosaic-work of colored pebbles at the bottom." There, he sees faces with bewitching smiles; each face seems so fair and rosy, and every smile so sunny that he feels sad when it disappears, until the flitting light and water make a new one. Sometimes he suddenly cries out: "The dark face gazes at me!" and then he is miserable the whole day afterwards. It is explained that his imagination, reviving faster than his will and judgment, creates 11 shapes of loveliness" that are "symbolic of his character," and now and then a stern and dreadful shape appears that typifies his fate. During one particularly peaceful Sunday afternoon party in the garden, in the yellow richness of the last rays of sunshine, Clifford seems to be in high spirits. But as the sunshine leaves the peaks of the seven gables, the excitement fades out of Clifford's eyes: "I want my happiness!" he cries out, hoarsely and indistinctly, hardly shaping the words. What Clifford sees, literally, is the shadow of the branch of the old elm tree. His imagination, like the old Pyncheon house, is haunted by an ominous face. It is also significant that when Phoebe, who lacks imagination, looks into the well she sees only colored pebbles and the tree's shadow. We were told in Chapter I that the outward appearance of the house reminds one of a human face, and we were told this fact immediately following the sentences which set up the house in opposition to the tree. So now, in the garden scene, we have all of the major images of the novel: the house opposed to the street, and the dark opposed to the light. Later, we will see that the tree is the source of whatever beauty the house possesses, and, further, that it will make the house "a part of nature." Then, significantly, at the end of the novel, the few leaves left on the elm by an autumn gale will "whisper unintelligible prophecies" as the last of the Pyncheons leave the house forever. Clifford's fear of the branch—his seeing it as a "face"—is clearly a foreshadowing, a portent of the end of the Pyncheons. The joy which Clifford finds in the garden is transient, like the The House of the Seven Gables 34

family itself, but he is more comfortable there than he is looking out upon the world in Chapter 11, "The Arched Window." There, he gazes out from the vantage point of the window, while he himself is concealed and "peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain." Note here that there are things which Clifford's mind will not retain; for example, he never becomes accustomed to the water cart that goes by the house two or three times "during the sunny hours of the day . . . leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white dust." It is "like a summer-shower." The scene, trivial and matter-of-fact as it appears to be, fits a pattern in The House of the Seven Gables. Commonplace reality should, and must, be faced. But the forgetful Clifford loses "the recollection of this preambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely" as does the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strews "white dust again." Clifford looks out at life in an instinctive attempt to rejoin it. His deepest and most dangerous commitment comes from the sight of a political procession. Clifford sees the procession as a moving mass of living humanity, and he wants to leap into it. He is restrained just in time. Hepzibah and Phoebe keep him from plunging into "the black river" that flows beneath him, an ambiguous river of life. When this happens, Phoebe, to whom all extravagance is a horror, bursts into sobs and tears. In a similar yearning to renew "the broken links of brotherhood," Clifford thinks of going to church. But when Clifford and Hepzibah seek to follow Phoebe from the house, they can barely cross the threshold of the house, feeling as if they are "standing in the presence of the whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible eye on them alone." Defeated, they shrink back into the dark passageway and close the door. Clifford is not ready to face the broad sunshine of reality, of the street. Escape from the house is impossible, so he takes refuge in blowing soap-bubbles, "little, impalpable worlds . . . in hues bright as imagination."

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Chapters 12–14 Summary Clifford, who becomes fatigued easily, is now in the habit of retiring early, which is fortunate for Phoebe, who thus has a good deal of time to herself. Interestingly, she is changing; her eyes are now larger, darker, and deeper, and she seems to be less girlish. In the summer house, she is occasionally thrown into the company of Holgrave, who tells her about his varied career as a schoolmaster, salesman, country editor, peddler, sailor, communal farmer, hypnotist, and now as a photographer. He has retained his good conscience always, but he seems to obey strange rules. He is calm, cool, and more intellectual than emotional. He asks Phoebe about Clifford and seems surprised that she does not wish to try fathoming the man's nature. Holgrave rants about the dead weight of the past, says that houses should last only twenty years, and he mentions Maule's curse, which he says is very real. He fancies himself to be quite a thinker, but one might well wonder whether he himself will ever amount to anything. He tells Phoebe that he is a published author, and he begins to read to her a story that he has written about Alice Pyncheon. Holgrave's story relates that thirty-seven years after the house was built, the owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, grandson of the old Colonel, summoned the carpenter Matthew Maule, the only son of Thomas Maule, who built the Pyncheon mansion, to ask him about the missing documents, the deeds to "the lands eastward." Matthew took offense at Gervayse's European manners, and so, for revenge against the Pyncheons in general, he hypnotized the proud, beautiful, and pure Alice Pyncheon. Immediately thereafter, Alice described her vision of the old wizard Maule and his carpenter son as they tried to prevent blood-soaked old Colonel Pyncheon from releasing a parchment document to his heirs. Later, Alice, still a mesmerized "slave," kissed Matthew's bride, then caught cold, and died. Her sudden death wounded the carpenter's grandson; he gnashed his teeth—he had sought only to humble Alice, not destroy her. Phoebe is half-hypnotized by the exciting story of Alice, and Holgrave admirably resists a terrible temptation to say something to Phoebe to make her his slave forever. In the darkening garden, the two young people talk of Holgrave's unusual happiness here, and of Phoebe's feelings of maturity because of her help to The House of the Seven Gables 36

Clifford and Hepzibah; she has given them some of her "sunshine" and the presence of her youth, a quality which swiftly passes. Phoebe explains that she must go home again, for a few days, but she says that she will be back soon. Holgrave says that he enjoys watching the drama of two centuries seemingly drawing to a close. Phoebe calls him heartless, but he explains that he has only a mystical feeling, that he really knows nothing of consequence concerning the old Pyncheon house. Two mornings later, Phoebe takes a train bound for home. Hepzibah notes Phoebe's growing sadness. Clifford, however, calls her "a bud now blooming"; Uncle Venner urges her to return quickly, since otherwise he may be at the workhouse, and he calls her an angel who is essential to the well-being of her old cousins. Commentary Discussing Clifford with Holgrave in Chapter 12, "The Daguerreotypist," Phoebe reflects that Clifford's mood changes without any reason that can be guessed at—"just as a cloud comes over the sun." She feels, however, that it is not quite right to look too closely into his moods. The dark, more analytical Holgrave seems to understand Clifford's moods; nevertheless, he turns the conversation to subjects less dark. Holgrave, a descendant of the submerged and almost forgotten Maules, carries with him some of their darkness. His tale of Alice Pyncheon, in Chapter 13, is not a tale "for the open daylight." In fact, he begins it while the late sunbeams gild the old Pyncheons' House of the Seven Gables. The story is a narrative of Pyncheon pride and the dark powers of the injured Maules; it is set some thirty-seven years after the construction of the house and the mysterious death of its founder. In Holgrave's tale of Alice Pyncheon, the aristocratic Alice, who "deemed herself conscious of a power—combined of beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of womanhood" is, in effect, seduced by the second Matthew Maule. The language of the entire episode is transparently sexual, and Alice is drawn not merely by Matthew's hypnotic prowess but by also "the remarkable comeliness, strength, and energy of Maule's figure." The outcome of this "seduction," however, is not a true union of any sort. Having been socially insulted by Alice's arrogant father, Maule uses his sexual mastery only to demonstrate his sadistic control over Alice. "A power that she little dreamed of had laid its The House of the Seven Gables 37

grasp upon her maiden soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic bidding." As a Maule, Holgrave possesses the family's mesmeric powers which seduce and destroy. But it should be noted that he has resisted the temptation to assume control over Phoebe through either his sexual prowess—inherent in the sexual quality of the tale and in his being a Maule—or the effects of his miming, as he imitates the gestures by which Matthew Maule hypnotized Alice Pyncheon. Even though Holgrave has too much integrity, too much "reverence of another's individuality," Phoebe does emerge from her dreamlike trance to a beautiful moonlit evening and a new interest in Holgrave, an interest which will soon grow into love. Before we begin to generalize Holgrave's character in wholly positive terms, there are a few considerations we should examine. Holgrave's education has been the result of "passing through the thoroughfares of life," while not being a part of that life. He has passed through a great number of occupations in his relatively short life—none of which he has mastered. Not only is he a sort of jack-of-all-trades, but he has stuck with none of them. In his present occupation, he is a photographer, a daguerreotypist; he "makes pictures out of sunlight"; this occupation is another sign of a flaw in his character. He is motivated by an intellectual curiosity, of which his daguerreotypes are an emblem, and he is not a creative artist despite the fact that he is believed to be one, for his pictures lack both depth and chiaroscuro. They penetrate judge Jaffrey's exterior but, like Holgrave's limited vision, they offer no insight into the complex shadows of Jaffrey or, by extension, the house and its occupants; in fact, they tend to isolate the particular individual from his context. Holgrave is a walking paradox: on one hand, he has cut himself off from tradition; on the other hand, he is very much part of that tradition. He believes that all houses should be made of wood and should be razed after twenty years; at the end of the novel, he is planning to build a new stone house. He does not wish to control Phoebe, but he does wish that he had Phoebe's chance to try and truly fathom Clifford's actions. Perhaps the most damaging testimony that Hawthorne gives against Holgrave is that he is too much the scientist, too much a cerebral man to ever be the "savior" of the house and its occupants. Phoebe herself recognizes this. The House of the Seven Gables 38

Chapters 15 & 16 Summary Several sunless, stormy days pass after Phoebe's departure. Then one morning, judge Pyncheon ponderously enters the shop and responds to Hepzibah's scowl with his usual hypocritically genial smile. He wants to see Clifford, but Hepzibah refuses to permit this, accusing her dark visitor of hounding her nearly demented brother. The judge, of course, protests. He is eminently respectable—in position, public service, church work, avocations, appearance, and manners. The judge tells Hepzibah, furthermore, that it was he who managed to free Clifford; now, he is convinced that Clifford knows where their rich dead uncle's treasure can be located, and if Clifford does not reveal the facts, the judge will have him locked up for life in an insane asylum. Terrified, Hcpzibah agrees to call Clifford, but she warns the judge that God is watching. The judge then goes into the parlor and flings himself impatiently into the old ancestral chair. Going to find Clifford, Hepzibah looks uneasily out at the rainy street, wishing that Uncle Venner, limping along, would bring aid. Then she wonders if Clifford does know something about the location of the alleged family treasure; then she decides that he probably does not. With Phoebe gone, Hepzibah can now turn only to Holgrave; yet when she looks into Holgrave's chambers, she sees only a frowning daguerreotype of the hated judge. Her attempt at a prayer from the arched window "falls back on her head like lead." Finally she knocks at Clifford's room; there is no answer. She opens the door and discovers that the room is empty. Screaming to judge Pyncheon that Clifford has disappeared, she finds the ponderous old man still silently seated and Clifford beside him, bowing in mock obeisance and laughing. Saying that "the weight is lifted," her brother then orders her to get some money and a cloak, escape with him, and leave the house to the judge. Hepzibah follows her brother's lead, and they leave the mansion with the judge inside, like a dead nightmare. Commentary With Phoebe gone, an easterly storm sets in. Meanwhile, Hepzibah seems to be very much like the gray and sullen weather; the east wind itself, Hawthorne tells us, seemed to be wearing a rusty black silk gown and a turban of cloud wreaths on its head. Hepzibah tries to warm her life a bit by making a fire in the The House of the Seven Gables 39

parlor, but a "stormdemon" seems to keep watch above and, whenever a flame is kindled, the smoke is driven back again, choking the chimney's "sooty throat with its own breath." The hearth, of course, has already been compared to the heart of the old house, and in this scene we find the chimney choking within its own throat in the same way that the Pyncheons have choked, both physically and psychologically. This is one of the best instances of Hawthorne's yoking together the parallel personifications of the Pyncheon house and its inhabitants. Clifford, after a struggle, finally takes to his bed in despair, and not long afterward, the judge arrives, trying to disguise himself with a kindly, fraudulent countenance. When he reveals the purpose for wanting to see Clifford, "the very frown of the old Puritan" darkens the room as he speaks. Hepzibah looks deeply into the soul of judge Pyncheon "at this moment [sensing] some black purpose." Few share Hepzibah's dark opinion of her kinsman, but the judge's own conscience is at rest, Hawthorne tells us, for men of his kind often delude themselves. The "splendid [material] rubbish" of the judge's life should be compared at this point to his "smile of broad benevolence"; on the surface, he seems to have no "darker traits." Yet when he is defied by Hepzibah, his true self is revealed, and he tries to enforce his demand to see Clifford with a "harsh frown," while his brow grows "almost a black purple in the shadow of the room." At this particular moment, the house has never seemed so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she goes to summon Clifford to come and speak with the judge. The legends of the Pyncheons, "which had heretofore been kept warm in her remembrance by the chimney-corner glow," now recur to her, "somber and ghastly cold." Gazing from the arched window, Hepzibah lifts her eyes, scowling, trying valiantly to send up a prayer through the "dense, gray pavement of clouds." The clouds have gathered "as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble, doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better regions." Unable to find her brother, she wonders if he has strayed outside and perhaps taken refuge in the summer house. Finally, in desperation, she turns back to the waiting judge. But because of the shade of the branches across the windows, the smokeThe House of the Seven Gables 40

blackened ceiling, and the dark oak-paneling of the walls, Hepzibah's imperfect sight can barely distinguish the judge's figure. Thus, ironically, he duplicates in his death the emptiness of Clifford when he first, shadow-like, appeared to Phoebe's eyes in the same room. Clifford himself now reappears, this time clearly visible and, in another irony, reproducing the pallor of the dead man. Clifford's face is "preternaturally pale; so deadly white, indeed, that through all the gleaming indistinctness of the passageway," Hepzibah can clearly discern his features, as though a light is falling directly on them.

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Chapter 17 Summary Hepzibah and Clifford dash out through the summer rain and soon find themselves at a railroad station; they board a train and Clifford seems to be almost bubbling; Hepzibah, however, views the passengers about them as though they were figures in a dream. Clifford then strikes up a wild conversation with a gimlet-eyed old man across the aisle and speaks of the railroads' role in creating a new order of nomads; then he declares a need to tear down all houses—particularly those with blood-stained corpses in them—and goes on to rave further about the value of mesmerism, spiritualism, electricity, and the telegraph—except when it is used to apprehend bankrobbers and murderers. Repeatedly, Clifford describes a seven-gabled house "presided over" by a corpse. Suddenly Clifford wants off the train, and he and his prayerful sister alight at a way-station under gloomy clouds. Commentary When Clifford and Hepzibah flee the house in Chapter 17, they merge with their dark surroundings. "Had it been a sunny and cheerful day," Hawthorne notes, they would have been noticed. As it is, however, they seem to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather; they "melt into the gray gloom." Correspondingly, Hepzibah's feeling of indistinctness and unreality keeps dimly hovering about her. When she boards the train with Clifford, the motion adds to this sense of the unreal: the "spires of meetinghouses" seem "set adrift from their foundation"; the "broad-based hills" glide away. Everything seems "unfixed." For the moment, Clifford is highly exhilarated. As he converses, his countenance glows. A "youthful character" seems to shine out from within him, "converting the wrinkles and pallid duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask," Yet the House of the Seven Gables and the figure of the dead judge Pyncheon run obsessively through all he says. Wildly theorizing, he says that it is "as clear as sunshine" that houses should be abolished: "The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it." He speaks repeatedly of "a certain house . . . a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, damp-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable dungeon." This, of course, is the Pyncheon's dark and deadly House of the Seven Gables. The House of the Seven Gables 42

At the thought, Clifford's face darkens and seems to contract, shrivel itself Lip, and wither into age. Yet his conversation keeps coming back to the house, and he repeats key phrases: "a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion . . . a dark, low, cross-beamed, paneled room of an old house" in which a dead man sits in an armchair, "with a blood-stain on his shirt-bosom." Finally, he sees a "wooden church, black with age," and he realizes that no real flight from the old Pyncheon house is ever, really, attainable. Clifford and Hepzibah cannot redeem themselves. This chapter, describing Clifford's and Hepzibah's temporary but invigorating escape from the house, is one of the high points of the novel. For a moment, however, Jaffrey's death seems to lift the whole burden of the past, for Clifford excitedly throws off his old damask dressing-gown, dons a cloak, and triumphantly guides Hepzibah out of the house and into the street. Almost instinctively, he guides her to a train, which is one of Hawthorne's symbolic representations of the contemporary scene. As the train gathers speed and the landscape with its emblems of the past melts away in the gloom of the stormy afternoon, Clifford immediately concocts a marvelous conversational hodgepodge of ideas. In an ironic parallel with Holgrave, he hysterically denounces the evils that accumulate around roof and hearthstone, and he urges their destruction by fire. (Of course, the House of the Seven Gables is made of stone and cannot burn; it must crumble away from the inside in order to fall.) With a kind of Emersonian optimism, Clifford describes an ever-ascending spiral of progress in which material crudities are gradually spiritualized. "These railroads," he says, "arc positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel!" He then cites the current fad phenomena of mesmerism and spiritualism, and his excitement grows to an even more feverish pitch when he exalts the vitalizing power of electricity. Electricity, he says, is an angel, a mighty physical power, an "all-pervading intelligence!" These speculations are climaxed by Clifford's praise of the telegraph, which, he, like Thoreau, considers to be "an almost spiritual medium." Hepzibah is understandably bewildered by all this, and as the two confused wanderers prepare to alight from the train, Hawthorne reveals one of the ironies attendant upon Clifford's praise of civilization. The stranger to whom Clifford has been The House of the Seven Gables 43

speaking says, "I can't see through you!" pointing up the fact that Clifford's excursion into the world has given him a transparency inconsistent with his former shadowy status in the house. Clifford's mood—as the flight itself—is only temporary, and at the lonely train station Clifford's tremulous exhilaration dribbles away, and he turns once again to Hepzibah for guidance. Their trip, their attempted escape from the house, has been a total failure.

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Chapter 18 Summary Meanwhile, back in the old Pyncheon house, judge Jaffrey Pyncheon remains seated in the foreboding house, heedless of time. This is odd, because he is burdened with engagements—he should see Clifford, and then he should see his broker, attend an auction to add a parcel of land to the Pyncheon holdings, buy a house, check on his wife's fallen tombstone, give generously to his political party and a trifle to a needy widow, and consult with his doctor about his throbbing heart. He also has a private political dinner to attend, with all manner of luxurious foods and wines. Will he be nominated for governor? This is indeed a keen matter, for there is blood on the judge's shirt front. Darkness falls and covers the judge's figure, and, meanwhile, the judge's watch continues to tick on. The wind rises. One might easily imagine at this point that the seated figure might well be viewing a procession of Pyncheon ghosts—including those of the judge himself and his son. The moon rises, and a mouse approaches the seated figure. Is that a cat outside or the devil watching for a soul? By dawn, the judge's watch has stopped ticking. A fly crawls toward the open, lifeless, staring eyes of the judge. Commentary In Chapter 18, the story moves "like an owl, bewildered in the daylight" to the house where the dead judge is. This chapter is an ironic meditation on time and the eternity into which the dead man has entered. Time passes, minute by minute, and with it the judge's carefully organized commitments, including the political dinner, which would have made him the next governor of Massachusetts. Figuratively, however, the influence of the judge still seems to brood over the chamber. Hawthorne notes the shadows of the tall furniture becoming deeper, losing their distinctiveness of outline in the "dark, gray tide of oblivion." The gloom, he says, has brooded here all day, and now, "will possess itself of everything." But the judge's white face, curiously, does not become dark; instead, it turns into a kind of swarthy whiteness. The features all seem to be gone; there is only the paleness left. While the two fugitives are embarked on their wild flight through the streets and aboard the train, and as Clifford is The House of the Seven Gables 45

temporarily assuming the outside world's veneer, the corpse of judge Pyncheon is gradually fading into the shadows of the house. Throughout his life he has clutched at the solid "realities" of the past—real estate, in particular—while shrugging off the intangible heredity that contains his ultimate doom. On the surface, his motives are clear. Through his political influence, the judge has had Clifford released from prison for one reason only: Clifford will either divulge the whereabouts of the map and the deed "to the large tracts of land to the east"—or else Jaffrey will have him declared insane. Yet, the matter is not all that simple: from the beginning, when Hepzibah first opened her shop, and the judge scrutinized the old house from "the opposite side" of the street, one felt that his efforts to get inside the house unconsciously stemmed from something even deeper than greed. Hawthorne makes us feel that the judge believed that he could "exorcise" the black evil which infested the ancestral home; he seemed to feel the need to wrench out and analyze the secret of the dark old house's interior—its heart of darkness. Although that obsession is never made absolutely explicit, Hepzibah hints at it when she tells Jaffrey that he is "diseased in mind." The macabre chapter in which the narrator gloats almost to excess over the judge's death may repel some modern readers, but the passages are critical and necessary because they climax the subtle interaction between the sense of space and time that permeates this book. In addition, one of the novel's key ironies lies here. judge Jaffrey was a devotee of the mechanical system in which time is measured spatially; such a view of time assumes that our experience takes place at distinct, short instants. But the little card that falls out of Jaffrey's pocket on the doorstep forms "a prospective epitome of the day's history;" furthermore, his unerringly accurate watch measures the distance between his various engagements. One might say, indeed, that, in death, the judge's watch replaces his pulse. In the darkening inner parlor of the house, both the judge's watch and his pulse run down; the judge is overwhelmed by real time, and despite the judge's death, "the great world-clock of Time still keeps its beat." Hawthorne compresses the outcome in one sarcastic pun: "Time, all at once, appears to have become a matter of no moment with the judge!" But the rhetoric of, this chapter is not just a showpiece; it functions as part of the irony. The old Pyncheon house is a custodian: it holds the documents, books, and The House of the Seven Gables 46

poetry from the past. In the judge's material fashion, he tried to effect a synthesis between himself and his past—and the attempt killed him.

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Chapters 19 & 20 Summary The morning is gloriously sunny. The once old and dark Pyncheon house now seems alive and happy, and Alice Pyncheon's posies glow red in a corner of one of the upper mossy eaves. Uncle Venner tries to obtain some leftover vegetables for his pigs, but no one answers his knock at the Pyncheon house, although Holgrave yells a greeting to him. Various neighbors and potential customers of the shop gossip that Hepzibah and her brother must have gone to judge Pyncheon's country estate. The passing butcher is also annoyed when Hepzibah fails to emerge and buy some choice cuts from him. The young Italian hurdygurdy player and his monkey give a performance, but even they fail to elicit any response from the house. A rumor then erupts that the judge has been murdered, and thus the city marshal is consulted. Crowds suddenly begin to avoid the house, but a few daring young boys race each other past its gloomy confines. Soon Phoebe returns from the country; observing the untidy garden, she too senses a change. As she tries a door near the garden, it opens, oddly, from the inside. Holgrave then gently leads the anxious girl to a big, empty room, where he asks for her wisdom and strength as he shows her a recent picture which he just made of judge Pyncheon, sitting in death. Worried about Hepzibah and Clifford, Holgrave explains that for certain reasons, Clifford will probably be associated with these events. It is possible, Holgrave explains, that the Colonel, the uncle, and now the judge all died because of a similar hereditary weakness. He adds that, in his opinion, the natural death of the bachelor Pyncheon uncle was staged by the judge to look like murder a murder for which Clifford was unjustly imprisoned. For a brief moment, Holgrave and Phoebe forget the presence of death and exchange tender vows of love, in spite of her brief objection that she is too simple for his pathless ways. Commentary In Chapter 19, Hawthorne points out a tiny sunbeam which finds its way into the dusky old Pyncheon parlor, and then he traces it as it rises off the corpse of the judge, a man who will no longer walk the streets, with his smile of elaborate, fraudulent benevolence. The irony continues as the Pyncheon elm is suddenly filled with the morning sun. In fact, one branch of the The House of the Seven Gables 48

elm has been "transmuted to bright gold." For a time, on this early morning, nature surrounds the house with benign light and sound and motion. But while the elm makes a pleasant, cheerful, sunny sigh, elsewhere there is a swarm of insects buzzing under its drooping shadows, and a solitary little bird hovers over Alice's posies. The house, however, still remains a silent and impenetrable mansion. The butcher, peering through a curtain, catches a glimpse of "stalwart legs, clad in black, of a man sitting in a large oaken chair." This is the dead judge. The silence of the house rouses uneasiness. Children take alarm and run away, looking back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion. In these two chapters, Hawthorne calls upon a number of resources to strengthen the implications of his story and his characters by weaving an intricate pattern of his imagery, his symbols, and his myth. Angular and circular images begin and end the work, especially the decaying angular house and the spherical, cyclical elm; the elm, in particular, is especially dominant at the end of the novel. Images of light and dark also play an important part in defining for us the metaphorical dimension behind the story. For example, Phoebe enters the house "from the sunny daylight," and is almost blinded by the "density of shadows" lurking in the passages of the old house. The implications of Hawthorne's many symbolic images are supported and extended by the use that he makes of the Bible. From Psalm 49, the description of the wealthy and unjust landowners fits Hawthorne's treatment of the Pyncheons, and several verses in the psalm appear to be directly reflected in The House of the Seven Gables, particularly those containing images of seeing and darkness and light. In Psalm 49, the rich "trust in their wealth," forgetting that they are "like the beasts that perish." They are perfectly confident that "their houses shall continue forever" and so "call their lands after their own names." Yet, "death shall feed on them," like the fly on judge Pyncheon's sightless eyes, and "the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning"—as Holgrave has dominion over the dead judge when he takes his photograph and when he hovers over Phoebe in the garden. After the landowners parish, they join their ancestors in the darkness and "shall never see the light"—as Hepzibah has done, living with her literal and metaphorical near-sightedness The House of the Seven Gables 49

and as the judge has done, dying with open eyes.

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Chapter 21 Summary Before Holgrave can throw open the doors of the house and admit the warm sunlight, Hepzibah and Clifford enter and embrace Phoebe, now happily returned to them. After what is soon termed "a natural death," judge Pyncheon is quickly forgotten. A theory is advanced that as a youth he was surprised by his uncle while ransacking his uncle's desk. The old man had a seizure and died, and his would-be robber found two wills, one favoring the judge and another will of a later date favoring Clifford. Destroying the latter, the judge planted evidence pointing the finger of suspicion at Clifford, who was, accordingly, imprisoned for murder. The son of the judge has now predeceased him; so Clifford and Hepzibah inherit his wealth and country estate, to which they decide to move. Clifford is easier in his mind and happier now, but he is still not well. No great mistake can ever be really set right, Hawthorne seems to say. Holgrave finally tells Phoebe that he is a Maule, and laughingly he expresses the non-reformer's sorrow that their country estate is made of wood rather than of permanent stone. He finds a spring—which Clifford now vaguely remembers—in the ancestral portrait and reveals that behind it lies the now useless deed to the Indian lands. When they all decide in September to move into the country, they take Uncle Venner with them. The old man fancies that lie hears the shade of Alice Pyncheon playing sweet music. Commentary The day after the storm, when Phoebe returns from her visit to the country, she walks around to the back of the house, tries to get in, and finally decides to enter the garden. Here, both explicitly and implicitly, Hawthorne is drawing a parallel between his story and the biblical story of the fall in Genesis—but this is not the "fortunate fall" of some of Hawthorne's other works. Phoebe finds the Pyncheon garden in complete disarray from the effects of the storm. Weeds have taken over where there once were flowers and vegetables; in fact, the whole place looks deserted, littered, and dismal. Sin and death seem to have taken root. Some literary circles have maintained that Hawthorne is developing "the story of the fall of man" in this story of the house of Pyncheons. The House of the Seven Gables 51

Hawthorne draws not only upon the Bible in this novel, but also upon classical myth in order to develop his theme. For example, Phoebe's name means "shining" in Greek; it refers to emanating light, the sun in particular. Phoebus Apollo was the god of the sun, and Phoebe is one of the names of Apollo's twin sister, his feminine counterpart. But before we assign only positive connotations to the name, we should also remember that Phoebe was one of the names of Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt and protectress of the young; she was also goddess of childbirth and women. Hawthorne's irony is at work again here. One of the reasons, as we stated above, for the decline of the family has been its lack of childbirths, of progeny; and, as has been pointed out, Phoebe, like her namesake, is a virgin. Although she is soon to marry and become part of "a new Eden," the mother of the new Eden might also be the mother of a new "fall," for when they all leave the old "garden," it is in September—not in spring, when we generally think of regeneration's taking place; furthermore, there has been nothing, in Phoebe's character to suggest that she is stronger than the original Eve; in fact, she almost "falls" (succumbs) to Holgrave's mesmerism early in the story. Even more suggestive of Hawthorne's combining classical myth and biblical allusion is his reference to a "golden bough." When Uncle Venner, the morning after the storm, approaches the Pyncheon house where the dead judge sits as yet undiscovered in the ancestral armchair, old Uncle Venner notes that although the elm seems not to have been damaged by the storm, "a single branch . . . had been transmuted to bright gold." Then, making his classical allusion explicit, Hawthorne writes: "It was like the golden branch that gained Aeneas and the Sybil admittance into Hades." This one majestic branch hangs down before the main entrance of the seven gables so that any passerby might have stood on tiptoe, plucked it off, presented it at the door, and be admitted and, as a result, be aware of all the dark secrets of the house. When both Aeneas and the Sybil gained admittance to the underworld by the power of the golden talismanic branch, Aeneas learned both the secrets of the dead and the prophecies concerning the living. Reference to the myth functions, therefore, on several levels. First, it is still a general secret that the judge is dead inside the house; anyone entering would learn that secret. But the branch The House of the Seven Gables 52

is not just a sort of "key" to the house; it is a "mystic" branch, capable of unlocking secrets more mysterious than merely the judge's physical presence within. Reference to it transforms the house into an underworld, a realm where death is all-powerful and sits on the throne. Also, this single branch is only a small part of the tree. The rest of the tree is "in perfect verdure," a symbol of life, not of death. Because of its great circumference, the tree has come to symbolize nature and nature's resurrection; now, it overshadows the house, where there has been, since the beginning, only death, not resurrection. Now, "all was alive and full of the morning sun and a sweetly tempered little breeze." The "leafy tongues" of the tree's leaves are whispering the secrets of the living, just as the single, symbolic branch gives the secrets of the dead. The tree is full of life and light because it has finally succeeded in completely overshadowing the house and its occupants, both past and present. At the end of the novel, in the concluding sentences, Hawthorne makes this aspect of his allusion more explicit by telling us that the elm "whispered unintelligible prophecies." These "unintelligible prophecies" are like the secrets held by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, and here we are once more reminded that Phoebe and Holgrave, Clifford and Hepzibah are moving out of the House of the Seven Gables -out of Eden after the Fall, and into the new Eden, into a house built and established by the wealth of the judge. Thus, it seems more than a little likely that the new Pyncheon Eden will fare much better than the old one. In a cryptic way, The House of the Seven Gables has dealt extensively with both moral and psychological affairs. Its "necromancies" allow us to see the entire historical, social, and symbolic framework of the romance in relationship to guilt. From the opening pages of the novel, the focal symbol of the house is symbolized by "a human countenance," and the resulting struggle for possession follows familiar Hawthornian lines. The falsely accused "wizard" Matthew Maule has not been simply executed by his enemy, Colonel Pyncheon; he has been incorporated into the subsequent life of the house, like an ever present conscience. The new structure will not insure happiness. It will, Hawthorne tells us, "include the home of the dead and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments." The Pyncheon estate, therefore, The House of the Seven Gables 53

embodies a striving by almost all of its inhabitants to avoid responsibility for guilt. Such attempted avoidance of guilt is the genesis of all the ironic justice in The House of the Seven Gables. Every tyrant is at the mercy of his victim; or, as Hawthorne puts it in his American Notebooks, "All slavery is reciprocal." This maxim is first applied to the original Colonel Pyncheon, who dies while inaugurating the house he built on the executed Matthew Maule's property. It is clear that the Colonel's strange and unexplained sudden death is due to nothing other than his festering guilt toward Maule. The pattern is repeated for Gervayse Pyncheon in the story told by Holgrave; this Pyncheon's greed makes him tacitly cooperate when the second Matthew Maule, supposedly in exchange for a valuable document, takes mesmeric control over Pyncheon's daughter and subsequently causes her death. Jaffrey Pyncheon is similarly enslaved by the oppressed Clifford, who, some claim, "causes" the judge's death simply by freeing himself from Jaffrey's corrupt authoritarianism. Perfect justice is, of course, not accomplished. If the authoritarian Pyncheon characters suffer from a secret, sick malaise and eventually come to grief, they all, nevertheless, have a certain public dignity for compensation; revenge, then, is incomplete. The meek victims, by contrast, are in continual misery (when they survive at all) until Holgrave arrives, but even he retains his internalized sense of persecution. Hepzibah and Clifford, who are presented as figures of infantile innocence, escape Jaffrey's dictatorial presence, but even they are pathetic in trying to enjoy their freedom after Jaffrey's death. "For," Hawthorne says, "what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!" These sentences indicate Hawthorne's emphasis on the wasting away of the Pyncheon energies from generation to generation. Many critics have said that the conclusion to The House of the Seven Gables is a reconciliation of the past and the present into a "sunny" ending. But if that were positively and unquestionably so, we would have to admit that the story would end as no more than flimsy farce. It is more likely, given Hawthorne's dispensations, that the book ends with the heavy irony, which has imbued it throughout. Good old Uncle Venner, it turns out, is not going to the poorhouse; instead, he will end his days in a little gingerbread The House of the Seven Gables 54

cottage at the country estate. Chanticleer and his hens have already moved there and have already begun an indefatigable orgy of crowing and egg-laying. Holgrave, having completely surrendered to Phoebe, is contemplating a variety of doit-yourself projects, including the construction of a cut-stone house in suburbia. Hepzibah, now worth approximately a couple hundred thousand dollars, is prodigal in her gifts. Maule's well, formerly noted for its profound depths, is now "vomiting up" a volume of kaleidoscopic pictures. The conclusion is perhaps best summed up in a vision of Alice Pyncheon floating to heaven as she plays sweetly on her harpsichord. In concentrating our attention upon this ironic correlation of events following a final stormy afternoon, Hawthorne has emphasized the book's theme—that is, the interpretation of the past and present, the Pyncheon family still cut off from the street and still living on "tainted" money—thus perpetuating the eternal fall of the inhabitants of the House of the Seven Gables.

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CHARACTER ANALYSES Hawthorne's characters should never be studied in isolation. They are basically symbolic, and out of context they often appear incomplete and unsatisfactory. Hawthorne's writing does not permit a dominant "hero" or "heroine," nor does he encourage us to identify with his fictional characters as individuals. In all his major novels, Hawthorne's characters must be studied in their relationship to the groups of which they are a part. In The House of the Seven Gables, this group is composed of Clifford, Hepzibah, Holgrave, judge Jaffrey, and Phoebe. Hepzibah and Clifford have been overshadowed by the curse of the house, and they are powerless to help themselves. Although passive and helpless, Hcpzibah and Clifford are the most interesting of the characters; they are certainly more complex and profound than the simple, youthful Phoebe. The judge appears to be the agent of what evil there is in the book, and Phoebe, the agent of what is good. Holgrave, in contrast, has little to do with the action. All the characters, however, are incomplete in themselves. Phoebe is too sweet, a mere ing6nue; Hepzibah and Clifford are a bit ludicrous, and in their defenselessness they are sometimes nearly contemptible; the judge is too melodramatically villainous, and Holgrave is often too dry. Yet, together, they make up a design, and it is incorrect to suppose that Hawthorne intended them to be other than what they are.

Clifford Pyncheon Hepzibah's brother Clifford is the most melancholy and ineffectual of a long line of wasted and delicate Pyncheons. As the novel opens, Clifford has just emerged from thirty years in jail, but he remains in mental and emotional bondage, victimized by a past which he himself perpetuates. Even before his literal imprisonment, Clifford was a prisoner of a dream world, and now, out of prison, he is locked into his own illusions, particularly his illusions about feminine beauty; therefore, Phoebe is given the task of bringing him out of his childlike behavior because Clifford cannot bear the sight of Hepzibah since she has grown old and ugly. Clifford is a pure aesthete. He is tall, thin, and graying, and his The House of the Seven Gables 56

long years in prison have alienated him from light. His basic image is that of a thin gray cloud, through which rays of sunshine sporadically break through. In keeping with his seemingly aimless life, Clifford is dim and indeterminate. When Phoebe first encounters him, she cannot actually see him; she has only a sense of some living presence and inquires of Hepzibah, "Is there someone in the room with us?" And the next morning as Clifford sits at the breakfast table, his facial expression "seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to die away."

Hepzibah Pyncheon Hepzibah has lived alone in the House of the Seven Gables for thirty years, isolated "until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its timbers." She is a sixty-year-old spinster who cannot leave the house. Even during her brief flight with her brother Clifford, the house haunts her vision: as the train passes through "miles of varied scenery . . . there was no scene for her" but the house; "This one old house was everywhere. It transported its great, lumbering bulk . . . and set itself down on whatever spot she glanced at." Poor Hepzibah's dark, near-sighted scowl is the counterpart of the dark-browed house itself, and her scowl is both the cause and the effect of her isolation from society. Frail, gray-haired, and garbed in black rusty silk dresses, Hepzibah is sustained by "fantasies of the old time" and by a strong, passionate love for her brother. It is for his sake that she reopens the dusty little centshop, although her thoughts and fantasies reveal how she dreads it. Unlike Clifford, however, she does not live completely in a dream world; she is aware, sometimes painfully, of her isolation. Hepzibah and judge Jaffrey are ironic mirror images of each other, for she is dark without, and he is dark within. It is a tragic irony that Hepzibah's heart is soft and loving—if envious—while the outwardly genial judge is hard as a rock.

Holgrave Early in the first chapter, the narrator cites the prediction that old Matthew Maule's ghost will haunt the "new apartments" of the Pyncheon house. This prophesy comes true in the person of Holgrave, who lives in "a remote gable" of the house, barred from The House of the Seven Gables 57

the main portion. He dwells in the house, but he learns to hate it. Holgrave is a wayfaring, twenty-two-year-old man, one who has held a variety of jobs. He is now a daguerreotypist, an earlyday photographer. He is politically radical, denouncing wealth, tradition, and "the heavy hand of the past." More important, as a Hawthorne character, he is coldly intellectual, disdainful of sentiment, and capable of detached interest in observing the gradual disintegration of Hepzibah and Clifford—a fact which is exemplified in his taking a photograph of the dead Judge. As a Maule, Holgrave has the gift of mesmerism; but unlike his forefathers, despite his own lust for power, he does not use that power on Phoebe when he has the chance. However, Holgrave is certainly not the hero of the romance who marries the heroine. He does marry Phoebe at the end, it is true, but his stability and integrity are not to be completely trusted. We remember that he has been a jack-of-all-trades who follows the latest fads, a radical who renounces wealth and old houses; yet at the end of the novel, he is quite willing to live on the inherited money of the judge, and he is planning to build his own stone house in the country.

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon The image of the judge's inward self is alternately like a gray adamantine rock, and then it becomes very much like a heavily brooding cloud, embodied with a coldness that is the precise opposite of his outward "warmth." His benevolence is counterfeit. His evil is manifested in excess and discordance, and he passes from one extreme to the other. The "big, heavy, solid unrealities" of gold, real estate, and clothes are embodied by the judge. Distinguished by the "studied property of his dress and equipment," he and his benign smile are as superficial as the shine on his boots. In ironic contrast to Hepzibah, the "snowy whiteness" of the judge's linen hides the dark, corpselike soul within. He is a super-patriot; he is convinced that the fate of the country is staked on the November election, and he hopes to become governor. The judge is heavy-set, dresses in black, and carries a cane with a gold-plated head. His outward appearance is filled with virtue, and kindness, and generosity, but he is obsessed with a The House of the Seven Gables 58

grasping after wealth and power. In fact, he symbolizes Pyncheon pride and greed; from somewhere inside him, the corpse of the old Colonel is "diffusing its death scent." judge Jaffrey is a man of wealth, a politician, a judge, a churchgoer, and a civic-minded citizen, but he is, above all else, a clever and selfish man. He steals from his bachelor uncle, has his cousin Clifford sent to prison for a murder which Clifford did not commit, and now he harasses his cousin Hepzibah. In addition, he does not even repair the fallen tombstone of his dead wife.

Phoebe Pyncheon Phoebe is rather too obviously a "little ray of sunshine." She is seventeen years old, beautiful, wholesome, obedient, loving, respectful, and practical. But she is intellectually shallow and without much curiosity. She is the daughter of Arthur Pyncheon, the cousin of Hepzibah, Clifford, and the judge; he took up farming and married a country girl out of his social class. Phoebe's branch of the family lost contact with the other Pyncheons until she comes to stay with Clifford and Hepzibah after her mother, a widow, remarried. During Phoebe's visit, Hepzibah finds her to be cheerful, hard-working, and good at taking care of the cent-shop. She spends her extra time with Holgrave, with whom she falls in love; at the end of the novel the two young people are to be married.

Uncle Venner Uncle Venner is one of Hawthorne's unforgettable minor characters. He functions in the novel as a sort of one-man chorus, a philosopher of the street, who has "studied the world at street corners." Some of his golden maxims are "Give no credit!" and "Never take any paper money." While Hepzibah is trying to digest these "hard little pellets" of wisdom, Uncle Venner advises her, above all, to try to wear the symbol of the street, a "warm, sunny smile." The years of plodding up and down the gravel and pavement have left their mark on Uncle Venner's attire: he is patched together of different epochs, a veritable "epitome of times and fashions." Never having possessed the corrupting power of a judge Pyncheon, he is tough and vigorous without being hard. Sheer antiquity has mellowed him so that he is as familiar within several family circles as he is outside on the street. He looks The House of the Seven Gables 59

forward with pathetic cheer to ending his days at his "farm"—the poorhouse. In many ways, Uncle Venner is a foil for all the Pyncheons.

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HAWTHORNE'S USE OF SYMBOLS The House From the start, Hawthorne describes the House of the Seven Gables as if it were human; he says, 'The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance . . . expressive of the long lapse of mortal life." Personification continues in later descriptions of the house as "a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and somber reminiscences," its "meditative look" suggesting "that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon." The old Pyncheon mansion contains the collective consciousness of a single family; it is a sort of domesticated American version of a European gothic castle. The old and haunted house will, as we will see, permeate the minds of its aging inhabitants. Clifford thinks of himself and Hepzibah as ghosts, doomed to haunt their accursed house. Hawthorne, however, says that they have protracted their own anguish: their hearts have been dungeons, and each person has become his own jailer; the house is a larger equivalent of that dungeon. Both Clifford and Hepzibah, like Roderick and Madeline Usher in Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" face a future that is also, strangely enough, the past, for they can only become, in a manner of speaking, what they already are. Prisoners of time, they are equally prisoners of space; that space is expanded into an entire house and its environs. The orientation of the house signifies its place midway between two civilizations. It faces the commerce of the street on the west, while to the rear is an old garden. Its exterior is darkened by the "prevalent east wind," and the house contains within its gloomy halls a map of what is consistently referred to as the "Eastern claim." The land itself extends only as far east as Waldo County, Maine, but it is associated with the "princely territory" of Europe, and it symbolizes the aristocratic tradition of the Pyncheon clan, with its "antique portraits, pedigrees, and coats of arms." This trait is best personified in "foreignbred" Gervayse Pyncheon, grandson of the old Colonel, whose efforts to obtain the "eastern claim" were motivated by his desire to return to England, "that more congenial home." His daughter Alice was The House of the Seven Gables 61

also inordinately proud, and her beauty, her flowers, and her music all reflected this trait. The darkness of the old Pyncheon house is impressive and significant. Within its depths are shadowy emblems of the past, each representing evil geniuses of the Pyncheon family. The ancestral chair is a reminder not only of the old Colonel but also the susceptibility to Maule's curse (what appears to be apoplexy); the portrait and the map are dimly visible tokens of the Colonel's inflexible sternness and greed. The harpsichord is likened to a coffin (recalling Alice's fatal pride). None of the objects can be distinguished very clearly in the darkness, but the novel shows that they have an inescapable reality. Certainly their burden weighs heavily upon the present inhabitants of the house. Hepzibah's unbending and decadent gentility is matched by the stiff chairs, and her beetle-browed frown echoes the dark front of the house as it faces the sunny street. Any warmth that might be within her is masked by her gruff exterior. Clifford's undisciplined sensibility and faded beauty remind us of Gervayse and his daughter. The long intervening years and Clifford's unjust punishment have weakened and coarsened any of the positive traits of his ancestors. Whereas Gervayse savored fine imported wines in the past, Clifford voraciously gulps coffee and breakfast cakes; whereas Alice played hauntingly beautiful melodies on the harpsichord, Clifford must be content with a modern counterpart, listening to the creaky music of the Italian hurdy-gurdy. To move from the sepulchral darkness of the old Pyncheon house to the dusky sunlight of the street is to discover the hubbub of the contemporary environment. Although Hawthorne occasionally describes the street as a quiet by-way, he obviously intended to capture within it the whole throbbing turmoil of nineteenth-century life in this country. The street becomes "a mighty river of life, massive in its tide," brimming with chattering housewives and raucous peddlers and venders; the world is like a train or a bus dropping, here and there, a passenger, and picking up another. The current of life on the literal train that carries Clifford and Hepzibah away from the old house is typical-but the inhabitants of the House of the Seven Gables cannot be part of this modern society, and, more important, they cannot escape from the house. The House of the Seven Gables 62

The Portrait The evil spirit that haunts the house is fixed in the portrait of its founder, Colonel Pyncheon, the man who denounced Matthew Maule to seize his property. The old portrait is the demon of guilt that haunts the Pyncheon house. Its resemblance to judge Pyncheon, the "villain" of this novel, continues the weight of guilt in the past into the present, as the judge recapitulates the criminal greed of his ancestry. Although Hepzibah feels reverence for the portrait, she senses its spiritual evil and ugliness; she also identifies judge Pyncheon as "the very man." Phoebe sees the portrait and learns of its legend; then as she looks at the judge, she recalls Maule's curse that Colonel Pyncheon "would drink blood." The gurgling in the judge's throat "chimed in so oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the judge, that for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity." Clifford is so disturbed by the portrait that he asks Hepzibah to hang a curtain over it. The demonic portrait, however, literally covers a hidden "recess" behind it—a hiding place for the "lost dead." Clifford responds to the portrait as to a dream that conceals a secret: "Whenever I look at it, there is an old, dreaming recollection haunting me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to say! . . . What could this dream have been!" Then, finally, Holgrave presses a hidden spring, and the portrait tumbles down to reveal the hiding place of the worthless Indian deed which "the Pyncheons sought in vain, while it was valuable."

The Deed Like other hidden objects in Hawthorne's fiction, the deed is, itself, evidence of past evil persisting into the present. Holgrave, who finds the deed, is a descendant of the executed Maule, whose son built the house and who took his own revenge on the Pyncheons by building the recess to conceal the valued document. The document itself, however, is now worthless.

Maule's Well Although Maule's Well is separated from the house, it is symbolically the soul of the house, and it also serves incidentally to define Clifford's imagination. Like the fountain in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables 63

"Rappaccini's Daughter" and like the ancient spring in his novel The Marble Faun, the well exists outside the story's temporal limits. Hawthorne stresses that its waters might be contaminated; the first Maule built his cottage beside its sweet spring, but Colonel Pyncheon's house seemingly befouled it. Yet the last paragraph of the novel identifies the well as being once more a reservoir of knowledge, "throwing up a succession of kaleidoscopic pictures" which only the "gifted eye" can see. These are prophetic pictures, foreshadowing the future lives of Hepzibah, Clifford, Phoebe, and Holgrave.

The Mirror The mirror in the Pyncheon parlor is another object which figures as a part of the past, although not literally. In fact, no one in the story even looks into it. Near the beginning of the novel, Hawthorne describes the "large, dim looking-glass . . . fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there." And he reports a legend that the Maules retain a mysterious power to summon back the dead, and "make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons," who are "doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow." Another mirror passage near the end of the novel, inserted after judge Pyncheon's death, contains a strange dream pageant. After reporting a "ridiculous legend" that the dead Pyncheons assemble in the parlor at midnight, Hawthorne imagines them becoming part of a jostling parade, marching past the Colonel's portrait to confirm that it is still hanging, and looking for the secret behind it. Hawthorne mocks his own conceit as a freak of fancy, but nonetheless he suggests that it has a life and truth of its own. He had begun by indulging his fancy as "a little sport," but soon found he had "partly lost the power of restraint and guidance." The "visionary scene" also draws on literary conventions by conveying information otherwise unknown: the judge's sole surviving son has died; therefore, all the Pyncheon property will be inherited by Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe. Hawthorne cautions his reader not to think of the episode as "an actual portion of our story" but merely as an extravagance initiated by moonbeams and shadows which are "reflected in the looking-glass"; however, he then restores the mirror's special The House of the Seven Gables 64

credibility by saying that such a reflection, "you are aware, is always a kind of window or door-way into the spiritual world."

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SUGGESTED ESSAY TOPICS Short Papers 1. Discuss the concept of guilt that is developed throughout the novel. 2. Flower imagery plays a large part in the meaning of the novel. Consider the references and allusions to flowers in the novel; then discuss whether or not there is a progression of meaning and/or symbolism to them. 3. Discuss the importance of Hawthorne's use of historical sources and allusions to present his central theme in the novel. 4. Analyze Hawthorne's use of isolation in the novel by defining what the "real evil" of isolation is in the novel. 5. Distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. Discuss whether or not the novel is a sentimental novel. 6. Explain how the dominant colors in the novel contribute to the effectiveness of its plot, characterization, and theme. 7. Discuss the use of mirrors and shadows in the novel. 8. Discuss the dichotomy between intellect and emotion, between "the head and the heart," as a thematic concern of the novel. 9. Show how Hawthorne applies the concept of original sin in the novel. 10. Discuss Hawthorne's use of crowds and crowd imagery in the novel. 11. Describe the use of the supernatural in the novel and explain its function or functions. 12. Analyze Hawthorne's love of and use of paradox in the novel. 13. Define the atmosphere and the changes that occur in the atmosphere of the novel. 14. Discuss the tone of the novel in relation to the point of view expressed in the novel. 15. Analyze the function of one major character in the novel. 16. Make a case for the novel's being an allegory, a parable, and/or a romance.

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Long Papers 1. In The House of the Seven Gables, the seven gables could be said to embody the seven deadly sins: for example, the sloth and envy of Hepzibah; the lust, avarice, and anger of judge Jaffrey; the gluttony of Clifford; and the pride of all the Pyncheons. Define each of the seven deadly sins and discuss how each is manifested in one or more of the characters in the novel. If the house is considered as hell or Hades (a possibility, since the "golden bough" is alluded to), discuss the respective "punishment" of each character in relation to his or her sin. 2. It has been said that this novel is Hawthorne's fictional expression of a belief in the possibility of redemption from evil. Discuss this statement in relation to the novel. 3. Although the novel itself does not dwell on superstition, the "village gossips" hint that the House of the Seven Gables was built over an "unquiet grave." Discuss the use of tradition, legend, and superstition in the tale. 4. Hawthorne projects one of the themes of The House of the Seven Gables in a series of antitheses: Poverty is contrasted with riches, the present with the past, aristocracy with democracy, youth with age, greed with unselfishness, the complex with the simple, appearance with reality, pride with humbleness, and the isolated with the unisolated. Discuss the contrasts in respect to what Holgrave terms "the united struggle of mankind," the necessity of participation by mankind with mankind. 5. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne brings together biological, social, and moral forces, and the house itself is the most complex symbol of these forces. Discuss the use of the house as a biological, social, and moral symbol.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ABEL, DARREL. "Hawthorne's House of Tradition," South Atlantic Quarterly, LII (October, 1953), pp. 561-78. ASSELINEAU, ROGER, ed. The Merrill Studies in The House of the Seven Gables. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1970. BEEBE, MAURICE. "The Fall of the House of Pyncheon," Nineteenth Century Fiction, XI (June, 1956), pp. 1 - 17. BIRDSALL, VIRGINIA OGDEN. "Hawthorne's Fair-Haired Maidens: The Fading Light," PMLA, LXXV (June, 1960), pp. 250 - 56. CREWS, FREDERICK C. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. DAMERON, J. LASLEY. "Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables: A Serpent Image," Notes and Queries, VI (July-August, 1959), pp. 289-90. DILLINGHAM, WILLIAM B. "Structure and Theme in The House of the Seven Gables," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XIV (June, 1959), pp. 59-70. DRYDEN, EDGAR A. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. EMRY, HAZEL T. "Two Houses of Pride: Spenser's and Hawthorne's," Philological Quarterly, XXXIII (January, 1954), pp. 91-94. FARMER, NORMAN, JR. "Maule's Curse and the Rev. Nicholas Noyes: A Note on Hawthorne's Source," Notes and Queries, XI (June, 1964), pp. 224-25.

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FOGLE, RICHARD H. Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952. . Hawthorne's Imagery: The 'Proper Light and Shadow" in the Major Romances. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. GRIFFITH, BEN W., JR. "Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables," Georgia Review, V111 (1954), pp. 235-37. GRIFFITH, CLARK. "Substance and Shadow: Language and Meaning in The House of the Seven Gables," Modern Philology, Ll (February, 1954), pp. 187-95. HAVENS, ELMER A. "The 'Gold Branch' as Symbol in The House of the Seven Gables," Modern Language Notes, LXXIV (January, 1954), pp. 20 - 22. JACOBSON, RICHARD J. Hawthorne's Conception of the Creative Process. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965. JAMES, HENRY. Hawthorne. London: Macmillan and Company, 1879. KARIEL, HENRY S. "Man Limited: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Classicism," South Atlantic Quarterly, 52 (October, 1953), pp. 528-42. LEVIN, HARRY. The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. LEVY, ALFRED J. "The House of the Seven Gables: The Religion of Love," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XVI (December, 196 1), pp. 189 - 203. MALE, Roy R. Hawthorne's Tragic Vision. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957.

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