Five-minute digest
The House of the Seven Gables
Summary
The House of the Seven Gables is a romance of a New England family weighed down by an ancestor's crime. In the first chapter Hawthorne tells how Colonel Pyncheon, a stern Puritan, coveted the garden plot of the humble Matthew Maule and joined in the cry that sent Maule to the gallows as a wizard during the witchcraft delusion of 1692; on the scaffold Maule declared that God would give him blood to drink. The Colonel built his many-gabled mansion on Maule's ground, employing Maule's son as carpenter, and was found dead in his great chair on the day of the housewarming, his ruff stained with blood. A lost Indian deed to vast eastern lands in Maine haunts the family thereafter. Nearly two centuries later, around 1850, the decaying house is held by Hepzibah Pyncheon, a poor, nearsighted, scowling old maid who must swallow her gentility and open a cent-shop in the front gable to wait for her brother. Her first customer is the urchin Ned Higgins, and her lodger is Holgrave, a young daguerreotypist and reformer of no fixed calling. Her country cousin Phoebe arrives, cheerful and practical, and brightens the shop, the garden and the house. Then Clifford returns: Hepzibah's beloved brother, a man of delicate, beauty-loving temperament broken by thirty years' imprisonment for the supposed murder of their uncle. Their cousin Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, wealthy, smiling and respected, the living image of the old Colonel, presses to see Clifford. Holgrave reads Phoebe his story of Alice Pyncheon, in which an earlier Matthew Maule, grandson of the wizard, mesmerizes a proud Pyncheon daughter in exchange for the deed and holds her in his power until her death; Holgrave himself almost casts the same spell over Phoebe and refrains. While Phoebe is away, the Judge demands that Clifford reveal where the family's hidden wealth lies, threatening to have him confined in an asylum. Seated in the ancestral chair to wait, the Judge dies as the Colonel did. Clifford and Hepzibah flee by railway train, Clifford talking wildly of progress, before returning home. Holgrave reveals that the Pyncheon deaths come from a hereditary physical tendency, that Jaffrey had arranged the evidence against Clifford thirty years before, and that he himself is a descendant of the Maules. He and Phoebe declare their love. The Judge's only son dies of cholera, the family wealth passes to Hepzibah, Clifford and Phoebe, the useless deed is found behind the Colonel's portrait, and the household leaves the old house for the Judge's country home, taking old Uncle Venner with them. Ticknor, Reed and Fields published the book in Boston in 1851.
Top Lessons
The wrong that outlives the wrongdoer
Hawthorne's preface states the moral outright: the wrong-doing of one generation lives into later ones. Colonel Pyncheon's seizure of Maule's land produces a lost deed, a hereditary greed, a family pride that cripples Hepzibah, and a cousin who repeats the Colonel's crime. The novel asks how much of a family's character is inheritance and how much is choice.
Gentility and honest work
Hepzibah believes that a lady's hand is soiled by working for bread, and opening the cent-shop feels to her like a public disgrace. Holgrave tells her that being a true woman is better than being a lady, and Phoebe shows how cheerful competence can make trade gracious. The book treats the passing of old gentility with both sympathy and gentle comedy.
The surface and the secret character
Judge Pyncheon's warm public smile hides a hard and grasping heart, while Hepzibah's scowl is only nearsightedness covering a loving nature. Holgrave's daguerreotypes, made by sunlight, reveal the Judge's hidden sternness. The contrast trains readers to judge character by deeds rather than by reputation.
Reverence for persons
In Holgrave's tale the younger Maule uses mesmerism to take possession of Alice Pyncheon's will, and she dies of the humiliation. Holgrave, finding Phoebe falling under a similar influence as he reads, refuses to use it. Hawthorne presents this restraint as the turning point in Holgrave's character and the beginning of his love for Phoebe.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.”
“the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief”
“God will give him blood to drink!”
“But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter in what narrowness of means, always a lady.”
“There is a wonderful insight in Heaven’s broad and simple sunshine.”
“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?”
“all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve.”
Medical Lens
Hawthorne gives the family curse a double explanation, supernatural and medical. In Chapter I the physicians dispute over the Colonel's body, the eminent Dr. John Swinnerton calling it apoplexy, and the coroner's jury returns a verdict of sudden death; in Chapter XX Holgrave explains that this mode of death, with blood in the throat, has been a hereditary peculiarity of the Pyncheons striking men of the Judge's age in moments of passion, and that Maule's prophecy probably rested on knowledge of it. That pairing reflects mid-nineteenth-century interest in inherited constitutional tendencies. Mesmerism, then the subject of popular lectures in New England, appears in Holgrave's past as a lecturer and in the tale of Alice Pyncheon, where the carpenter's influence over her will reads as an account of induced trance and domination; Hawthorne's own letters show his wariness of mesmerism. Clifford's state after thirty years in prison, childlike, hypersensitive, given to sudden impulses such as the near leap from the arched window, is described in moral and aesthetic terms rather than diagnostic ones, and modern readings of it as institutional trauma are interpretations. The Judge's threat to commit Clifford to a public asylum on the evidence of neighbors' testimony shows how confinement for supposed insanity could be used as a family weapon in the period. The Judge's son dies of cholera, the epidemic disease of those decades.
- Chapter I, The Old Pyncheon Family
The physicians' dispute over the Colonel's death, Dr. Swinnerton's verdict of apoplexy, and the coroner's jury.
- Chapter XIII, Alice Pyncheon
Holgrave's tale of the younger Matthew Maule placing Alice in a mesmeric trance and controlling her will thereafter; Phoebe nearly enters the same state while listening.
- Chapter XV, The Scowl and Smile
Judge Pyncheon threatens Hepzibah that Clifford will be confined for life in a public asylum unless he reveals the family secret.
- Chapters VII–XI
Clifford's altered state after long imprisonment: his craving for beauty, his fears, his torpor and the impulse at the arched window.
- Chapter XX, The Flower of Eden
Holgrave's explanation of the Pyncheon deaths as a hereditary predisposition rather than a curse.