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3.2 AVERAGE
3.2 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
slow-paced
The language was beautiful and the characters intriguing, but there were about 100 pages in the middle that actually didn't need to be there. I'm glad I read it. I ultimately really enjoyed the plot, but... good heavens. A few fewer passages about Hepzibah's scowl or Clifford sitting in the garden would really have been a-okay.
That's a generous 3. I know that it's a classic. I know that he's a revered American author. It's just that there were SO MANY WORDS! I swear that there was a good 20 minutes (I listened to the audiobook.) describing Phoebe's personality. She just didn't have that much depth! So, I might be a heathen, but it was just too much. The basic - very basic - was good. It just went on too long.
First: what a fabulous title! I don't know what it is about it... so intriguing and mysterious.
This definitely isn't the kind of story I would have picked up on my own, though. My husband read and loved it, but it's a ghost story which isn't my usual fare. When we traveled through Salem recently, we almost toured the House of the Seven Gables, though--and I thought I would read the book beforehand so that I'd have some context. We didn't end up going and I didn't get to the book until after we'd come back home anyway, but it was still October and a ghost story seemed appropriate, so I gave it a shot. Frank had warned me that it started off very slow, but the prose was so beautiful that somehow he didn't mind. I felt the same way, though since a good half to 3/4 of the book was just character building, it did get a bit long even then.
The "prologue" begins at the time of the Salem Witch Trials, when one of the judges, Judge Pinchon, condemns one of the victims, Matthew Maule, because he covets his property. (This reminded me of King Ahab and Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kings.) Just before he hangs, Maule pronounces a blood curse upon Pinchon and his entire family line, that he will "have blood to drink." Later, the judge hires one of Maule's relatives as his architect to construct the House of the Seven Gables on the Maule property, ironically enough... and no sooner is it finished, then the judge is found dead, having apparently very literally choked upon his own blood in a strange respiratory illness.
Fast-forward through the centuries to the last of the Pinchon line. Hepzibah and her brother Clifford are sympathetic and down-and-out characters, but their cousin Jeffrey is also a judge, and the spitting image of the one who condemned old Maule. Jeffrey sent Clifford to prison in order to protect himself from taking blame for a crime that he in fact committed, and all but destroyed Clifford's sanity, while Jeffrey himself rose to prominence, wealth, and esteem. Meanwhile, another young cousin, Phoebe, comes to stay with Hepzibah and Clifford, and a daguerreotypist comes to visit as well, and tells Phoebe the history of the old home. He turns out to be a descendant of Maule, himself.
While there are no overt ghosts in the tale, the implication of a spiritual force of "karma" is strongly implied. The story is not so much grim as just atmospheric, and it does end happily, against all odds.
This definitely isn't the kind of story I would have picked up on my own, though. My husband read and loved it, but it's a ghost story which isn't my usual fare. When we traveled through Salem recently, we almost toured the House of the Seven Gables, though--and I thought I would read the book beforehand so that I'd have some context. We didn't end up going and I didn't get to the book until after we'd come back home anyway, but it was still October and a ghost story seemed appropriate, so I gave it a shot. Frank had warned me that it started off very slow, but the prose was so beautiful that somehow he didn't mind. I felt the same way, though since a good half to 3/4 of the book was just character building, it did get a bit long even then.
The "prologue" begins at the time of the Salem Witch Trials, when one of the judges, Judge Pinchon, condemns one of the victims, Matthew Maule, because he covets his property. (This reminded me of King Ahab and Naboth's vineyard in 1 Kings.) Just before he hangs, Maule pronounces a blood curse upon Pinchon and his entire family line, that he will "have blood to drink." Later, the judge hires one of Maule's relatives as his architect to construct the House of the Seven Gables on the Maule property, ironically enough... and no sooner is it finished, then the judge is found dead, having apparently very literally choked upon his own blood in a strange respiratory illness.
Fast-forward through the centuries to the last of the Pinchon line. Hepzibah and her brother Clifford are sympathetic and down-and-out characters, but their cousin Jeffrey is also a judge, and the spitting image of the one who condemned old Maule. Jeffrey sent Clifford to prison in order to protect himself from taking blame for a crime that he in fact committed, and all but destroyed Clifford's sanity, while Jeffrey himself rose to prominence, wealth, and esteem. Meanwhile, another young cousin, Phoebe, comes to stay with Hepzibah and Clifford, and a daguerreotypist comes to visit as well, and tells Phoebe the history of the old home. He turns out to be a descendant of Maule, himself.
While there are no overt ghosts in the tale, the implication of a spiritual force of "karma" is strongly implied. The story is not so much grim as just atmospheric, and it does end happily, against all odds.
Aside from the beautiful but WORDY style of writing which is tricky when I am tired this is a delicious, creepy, romantic old story. I absolutely loved the place, the characters, the moldiness and sunshine of this one!
~~The usual caveats apply regarding “spoilers” and detailed discussion of the plot~~
This is the oldest book I’ve read so far for the American Classics reading project, its publication date a good ten years behind the previous holder of that status (Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl). I doubt that this fact is directly responsible for Gables being my least favourite read of this project thus far—I am, after all, attempting to complete a PhD on Georgian and Regency writing—but it seems unlikely that it’s completely irrelevant, either.
For one thing, one of my primary issues with Gables is stylistic. Hawthorne provides a throwaway description of a main character, the elderly Hepzibah Pyncheon, as using many words when a few would do; clearly no one ever told the man that dwellers in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Like Dickens on a bender, Hawthorne stretches descriptions of minor events to almost unimaginable lengths. One entire chapter is an extended observational study of the corpse of Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon as it sits in the parlor of the Seven Gables for a whole day and night. The chapter is about twenty (ebook) pages long, and the punchline is the narrator revealing to us that the Judge is dead. We know! Because we are not total idiots! What makes this prolixity so frustrating is that there are the bones of something creepy under it all. A chapter that lavishes an entire day’s worth of book-time on examining a dead body is trying to do something, something about hypocrisy and mortality and irony and the nature of horror. There is a universe in which Hawthorne writes a version of The House of the Seven Gables that manages this.
Some elements work very well indeed. A sense of claustrophobia and stagnation is evoked brilliantly through setting choice alone: we barely read of anything happening outside the house, or at the very most its garden and the street it faces, for the first sixteen chapters (out of twenty-one). Hawthorne effectively conveys a sense of a depressing, dusty, enormous, dark, mostly-shut-up house, and the significance of that environment for the moods of its inhabitants. When Clifford and Hepzibah leave town and get on a steam train, it’s unbelievably startling; we sort of understand that they’re living in the nineteenth century, but the shock of transition from their dark, quiet world to the movement, noise, and bustle of long-distance transport is as severe as if they’ve time-traveled, highlighting their extreme isolation. Successful though this depiction is, though, it doesn’t necessarily make the reading experience more compelling. Combined with the floridity of the prose, the peculiar pacing (multiple consecutive chapters detailing Hepzibah’s first day keeping shop; a single chapter on her and Clifford’s brief existence as fugitives from Salem), the extremely guessable twists and the relative simplicity of the characterisation, it’s not easy to find a reason to keep reading.
For me, the thematic heart of The House of the Seven Gables is its exploration of dispossession, theft, and fraud as the true legacy of colonial America. The “curse” under which the Pyncheon family is supposed to labour was allegedly cast by a man named Matthew Maule, who was falsely convicted of witchcraft under the auspices of seventeenth-century founding patriarch Colonel Pyncheon. When Maule was executed, his property—a piece of land which Colonel P had long coveted—went up for sale; Pyncheon bought it, and, to add insult to injury, contracted Maule’s son, a carpenter, to build him a family mansion on that plot. Maule is said to have uttered his curse on the steps of the gallows: “God will give him blood to drink!” Most of the plot of Gables is about teasing the idea that this curse might be real, before revealing that nothing supernatural actually took place; the Pyncheon men have simply been dying of hereditary apoplexies. My reading of the curse, though, is as an allegory—one which Hawthorne may have only written unconsciously, or subconsciously—of American settler colonialism and the very concept of “property” in the New World. What are Matthew Maule and his descendants but a deracialised instance of a people whose land and heritage is stolen from them? What is Colonel Pyncheon, and his nineteenth-century avatar Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, but a symbol of the abuse of power, and specifically state-sanctioned violence, to oppress and disenfranchise? And what is “Maule’s curse” but a consequence of the foundational taints of the American nation—the displacement and genocide of indigenous Americans and the institution of race-based slavery? “Blood to drink”, indeed: The House of the Seven Gables was published just a decade before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter.
Having done what I feel is my duty by writing this review in good faith, however, I will end by pointing you to this Goodreads review, which caustically sums up much of what makes Gables such a frustrating reading experience.
This is my tenth book for the American Classics reading project! And I suppose it probably counts for R(eaders) I(mbibing) P(eril) XVIII, too. Although it really isn’t scary.
This is the oldest book I’ve read so far for the American Classics reading project, its publication date a good ten years behind the previous holder of that status (Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl). I doubt that this fact is directly responsible for Gables being my least favourite read of this project thus far—I am, after all, attempting to complete a PhD on Georgian and Regency writing—but it seems unlikely that it’s completely irrelevant, either.
For one thing, one of my primary issues with Gables is stylistic. Hawthorne provides a throwaway description of a main character, the elderly Hepzibah Pyncheon, as using many words when a few would do; clearly no one ever told the man that dwellers in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Like Dickens on a bender, Hawthorne stretches descriptions of minor events to almost unimaginable lengths. One entire chapter is an extended observational study of the corpse of Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon as it sits in the parlor of the Seven Gables for a whole day and night. The chapter is about twenty (ebook) pages long, and the punchline is the narrator revealing to us that the Judge is dead. We know! Because we are not total idiots! What makes this prolixity so frustrating is that there are the bones of something creepy under it all. A chapter that lavishes an entire day’s worth of book-time on examining a dead body is trying to do something, something about hypocrisy and mortality and irony and the nature of horror. There is a universe in which Hawthorne writes a version of The House of the Seven Gables that manages this.
Some elements work very well indeed. A sense of claustrophobia and stagnation is evoked brilliantly through setting choice alone: we barely read of anything happening outside the house, or at the very most its garden and the street it faces, for the first sixteen chapters (out of twenty-one). Hawthorne effectively conveys a sense of a depressing, dusty, enormous, dark, mostly-shut-up house, and the significance of that environment for the moods of its inhabitants. When Clifford and Hepzibah leave town and get on a steam train, it’s unbelievably startling; we sort of understand that they’re living in the nineteenth century, but the shock of transition from their dark, quiet world to the movement, noise, and bustle of long-distance transport is as severe as if they’ve time-traveled, highlighting their extreme isolation. Successful though this depiction is, though, it doesn’t necessarily make the reading experience more compelling. Combined with the floridity of the prose, the peculiar pacing (multiple consecutive chapters detailing Hepzibah’s first day keeping shop; a single chapter on her and Clifford’s brief existence as fugitives from Salem), the extremely guessable twists and the relative simplicity of the characterisation, it’s not easy to find a reason to keep reading.
For me, the thematic heart of The House of the Seven Gables is its exploration of dispossession, theft, and fraud as the true legacy of colonial America. The “curse” under which the Pyncheon family is supposed to labour was allegedly cast by a man named Matthew Maule, who was falsely convicted of witchcraft under the auspices of seventeenth-century founding patriarch Colonel Pyncheon. When Maule was executed, his property—a piece of land which Colonel P had long coveted—went up for sale; Pyncheon bought it, and, to add insult to injury, contracted Maule’s son, a carpenter, to build him a family mansion on that plot. Maule is said to have uttered his curse on the steps of the gallows: “God will give him blood to drink!” Most of the plot of Gables is about teasing the idea that this curse might be real, before revealing that nothing supernatural actually took place; the Pyncheon men have simply been dying of hereditary apoplexies. My reading of the curse, though, is as an allegory—one which Hawthorne may have only written unconsciously, or subconsciously—of American settler colonialism and the very concept of “property” in the New World. What are Matthew Maule and his descendants but a deracialised instance of a people whose land and heritage is stolen from them? What is Colonel Pyncheon, and his nineteenth-century avatar Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, but a symbol of the abuse of power, and specifically state-sanctioned violence, to oppress and disenfranchise? And what is “Maule’s curse” but a consequence of the foundational taints of the American nation—the displacement and genocide of indigenous Americans and the institution of race-based slavery? “Blood to drink”, indeed: The House of the Seven Gables was published just a decade before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter.
Having done what I feel is my duty by writing this review in good faith, however, I will end by pointing you to this Goodreads review, which caustically sums up much of what makes Gables such a frustrating reading experience.
This is my tenth book for the American Classics reading project! And I suppose it probably counts for R(eaders) I(mbibing) P(eril) XVIII, too. Although it really isn’t scary.
DNF at 50%. This is actually very readable, and I was probably getting to the good bits just when I stopped, but Hawthorne is a very funny writer, full of charming anecdotes; and I had my funny bone excised at birth. This just didn't work for me.
tight Gothic read
Nathaniel Hawthorne is actually hilarious
better than The Scarlet Letter
more supernatural than I thought? worth the old timey prose for sure.
Nathaniel Hawthorne is actually hilarious
better than The Scarlet Letter
more supernatural than I thought? worth the old timey prose for sure.
Please note that I gave this book half a star and rounded it to 1 star on Goodreads.
Bah. Bah a thousand times. I have no idea why I started reading this. I think for the Halloween Book Bingo and I ended up switching it out. This thing was painful to read. I don't even know what to tell you besides if you must read this, just pace yourself since trying to force read this thing was not fun at all. At least the last 10-15 pages were just about Project Gutenberg though. I am going to complain though that my library does not have this as an e-book to download, I had to read it via Overdrive which means I had to either read this via computer or my cell. I am so used to downloading my books to my Kindle for IPAD this was another reason why it took me so long to finish.
The long and short of it about this book is following a family and their ancestral home in New England taking place in the late 1800s. At first with describing the home and how the family (Pyncheon) came to own the land that the home was built on. At first I was intrigued since it sounded like something supernatural was taking place. But then the book jumps to the current resident of the home ( Hepzibah, say that 10 times fast) and I lost interest. There are additional characters here and there, but nothing really works. The best part of the book is when Hawthorne describes the grounds and house that sits there.
Other than the house, the whole book moves at a plodding pace.
We have the characters of Phoebe Pyncheon who moves in with her cousin Hepzibah and of course has all of the men falling for her.
I don't know what to say really besides the fact the flow was terrible throughout. Nothing happens and there's a lot of well maybe this is haunted (the colonel's chair) but nothing is really sad for certain.
I wish that the setting had come more alive for me while reading this book. I just couldn't picture things well at all and had to look up pictures of the house to get things more fixed in my mind while reading.
The ending was a big shrug from me. I am so glad I can finally stop seeing this thing on my currently reading list.
Bah. Bah a thousand times. I have no idea why I started reading this. I think for the Halloween Book Bingo and I ended up switching it out. This thing was painful to read. I don't even know what to tell you besides if you must read this, just pace yourself since trying to force read this thing was not fun at all. At least the last 10-15 pages were just about Project Gutenberg though. I am going to complain though that my library does not have this as an e-book to download, I had to read it via Overdrive which means I had to either read this via computer or my cell. I am so used to downloading my books to my Kindle for IPAD this was another reason why it took me so long to finish.
The long and short of it about this book is following a family and their ancestral home in New England taking place in the late 1800s. At first with describing the home and how the family (Pyncheon) came to own the land that the home was built on. At first I was intrigued since it sounded like something supernatural was taking place. But then the book jumps to the current resident of the home ( Hepzibah, say that 10 times fast) and I lost interest. There are additional characters here and there, but nothing really works. The best part of the book is when Hawthorne describes the grounds and house that sits there.
Other than the house, the whole book moves at a plodding pace.
We have the characters of Phoebe Pyncheon who moves in with her cousin Hepzibah and of course has all of the men falling for her.
I don't know what to say really besides the fact the flow was terrible throughout. Nothing happens and there's a lot of well maybe this is haunted (the colonel's chair) but nothing is really sad for certain.
I wish that the setting had come more alive for me while reading this book. I just couldn't picture things well at all and had to look up pictures of the house to get things more fixed in my mind while reading.
The ending was a big shrug from me. I am so glad I can finally stop seeing this thing on my currently reading list.