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eleanorfranzen 's review for:
The House of the Seven Gables
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
~~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.