Novel: The House of the Seven Gables

Overview

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 romance centers on a brooding New England mansion whose very timbers seem saturated with ancestral guilt. The House of the Seven Gables traces how a colonial act of injustice shadows the Pyncheon family for generations, and how tenderness, honest labor, and love gradually loosen that shadow. Blending Gothic atmosphere with domestic detail, Hawthorne sets the slow decay of a proud lineage against the stirrings of a more democratic, restorative future.

Origins and Curse

In seventeenth-century Salem, Colonel Pyncheon covets a modest carpenter’s plot owned by Matthew Maule. Maule is convicted of witchcraft and executed, and the Colonel builds his grand, many-gabled house on the seized land. On the day of its housewarming, the Colonel is found dead in his chair, and a rumor persists that Maule’s dying words laid a curse upon the Pyncheons: a warning that blood and misfortune would dog the family so long as they clung to ill-gotten ground.

Life in the Decaying House

Two centuries later, the house is shabby and dim, and its last resident mistress, Hepzibah Pyncheon, struggles to preserve gentility amid poverty. Near-blind and proud, she opens a tiny cent-shop in the front gable to survive, turning the ancestral threshold into a marketplace. Her brother Clifford, newly released after decades in prison for an uncle’s mysterious death, returns to the house fragile, childlike, and haunted. Relief arrives with Phoebe, a young country cousin whose warmth and competence infuse the rooms with light, tending the garden, soothing Clifford, and reconciling Hepzibah to everyday commerce.

Judge Pyncheon and the Secret

Enter Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, a prosperous relative who wears benevolence like a mask. He covets a rumored missing deed to vast Maine lands tied to the family’s fortunes and suspects Clifford knows its whereabouts. Lodging in the house is Holgrave, a reform-minded daguerreotypist and distant descendant of the Maules. Through his tale of Alice Pyncheon, a forebear hypnotized by a Maule artisan and ruined by the family’s pride, Hawthorne threads motifs of mesmerism, coercion, and the ethics of power. The daguerreotype’s unflinching light becomes an emblem of truth, catching the Judge’s latent hardness beneath his genial smile.

Climax and Resolution

The Judge corners Clifford in the house, seeking the deed and pressing his advantage; instead, he expires suddenly in the same ancestral chair where the Colonel fell, a grim rhyme of guilt and retribution. In panic, Hepzibah and Clifford flee by train, a jolt of modern velocity cutting through ancestral stasis. Once the Judge’s death is discovered, suspicion lifts from Clifford, and evidence of the Judge’s earlier machinations emerges. The supposed land claim proves illusory, but the Judge’s substantial estate descends to Hepzibah and Clifford. Holgrave confesses his Maule lineage yet chooses to renounce any hereditary revenge. He and Phoebe pledge themselves, uniting the rival houses in affection rather than conquest. The family decamps to the Judge’s country residence, planning to sell the gloomy mansion and with it their bondage to the past.

Themes and Symbolism

Hawthorne meditates on inherited sin and the possibility of moral repair. The decayed aristocratic house yields to the cent-shop’s humble trade; the garden and its tame fowls symbolize ordinary, sustaining life; the railroad and daguerreotype announce a new social light. Mesmerism and manipulation are countered by consent and candor. The house itself is a character, labyrinthine, shadowed, and finally vacated, its seven gables like compartments of the conscience.

Style and Significance

Rather than sensational incident, the book offers reflective narration, psychological nuance, and quiet humor. It stands as a critique of Puritan severity and inherited privilege, yet ends with domestic hope, suggesting that sympathy, work, and truth-telling can redeem what law and lineage have deformed.