The House of the Seven Gables

With the exception of Edgar Allen Poe, I have to admit that I have read very little by the great American writers of the 19th Century. My knowledge of Melville, Cooper, Hawthorne and others has been tempered by my great appreciation for their British brethren of the same time period. The House of the Seven Gables is the first (and so far only) Nathaniel Hawthorne I have read.

I don't know what I was waiting for. This is a great novel which I enjoyed very much. The story concerns the residents of the titular house, the once mighty and now down at the heel Pynchone family. The spinster Hepzibah is the only resident of the rotting old home save for a border, Holgraves, who is an artist. Legend has it that the progenitor of the Pynchone family, several generations previous, stole the land from another family and had the patriarch condemned as a witch. The latter cursed the former, and ever since, strange deaths have occurred at the house.

Soon, Hepzibah's solitary life is altered as first her distant cousin Phoebe, and then her mentally disturbed brother Clifford join her and her border. Phoebe manages to bring light and relative happiness to the shadowy existence of her older cousins, and begins a chaste romance with Holgraves. The idyll is broken up only by the infrequent visits of the wealthy and evil cousin Jaffrey, a local judge who for some reason terrifies Clifford and Hepzibah. Phoebe leaves for a short period of time, and soon the old curse of the house revisits the present occupants.

Hawthorne, in his forward, lets us know right away that the moral of the story is that the sins of the fathers can and will be brought down on the heads of those who come later. The house, a grand edifice when it was new, is a powerful symbol of the ruin that can befall once proud families when wealth and prosperity and built upon deception and greed.

Although the book runs for 270+ pages, very little in the way of action occurs. While that hardly sounds like an endorsement, the truth of the matter is that Hawthorne's prose is so amazing that the reader never feels bored by the lack of a steamroller plot. He spends an entire chapter in the company of a corpse over the course of a night, and his descriptions and intimate way of addressing the reader will put a chill up your spine. There is a great strain of the supernatural in this book, and it is easy to understand why Hawthorne was such a favorite of his contemporaries Melville, Thoreau, and Alcott.