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lucopher 's review for:
The House of the Seven Gables
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The prose was beautiful. The ghosty bits were fun. List of praises ends there.
Sexism and racism were handled so matter-of-factly that I quickly felt resentment for the story. I understand that it was a different time, but that argument won't fly with me in this case when the opening speaks so beautifully of generational violence and of people inheriting the sins of the past. It threatens to really go somewhere substantive but, from my viewpoint, never manages to get there.
The irony that the opening passages creates when juxtaposed to the narrative itself is, to me, a head scratching let down. Settler colonialism and slavery play a role in the story, but are never so much as problematized let alone being mentioned as major sources of generational trauma and inherited debt discussed in the opening. That suffering, isn't even portrayed as such in this novel. It just felt so tone deaf and that, to me, overpowered anything else Hawthorne accomplished in this book. I can't recommend.
Sexism and racism were handled so matter-of-factly that I quickly felt resentment for the story. I understand that it was a different time, but that argument won't fly with me in this case when the opening speaks so beautifully of generational violence and of people inheriting the sins of the past. It threatens to really go somewhere substantive but, from my viewpoint, never manages to get there.
The irony that the opening passages creates when juxtaposed to the narrative itself is, to me, a head scratching let down. Settler colonialism and slavery play a role in the story, but are never so much as problematized let alone being mentioned as major sources of generational trauma and inherited debt discussed in the opening. That suffering, isn't even portrayed as such in this novel. It just felt so tone deaf and that, to me, overpowered anything else Hawthorne accomplished in this book. I can't recommend.