The House of Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Classic Victorian Gothic Romance
Hawthorne’s Second Major Novel
The House of Seven Gables can be considered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second major novel. His first novel, Fanshawe, was self-published. His second novel, The Scarlet Letter, was a commercial success. The House of Seven Gables was published within a year of The Scarlet Letter and while not as popular over the decades, it was the book preferred by Hawthorne.
A Psychological Novel without Action
The book is 200-250 pages (depending on font size) of Victorian gothic romance. If your taste doesn’t run to the gothic or the symbolic, The House of Seven Gables will not interest you. It will, in fact, bore you. However, if gothic literature interests you and you are interested in the psychology of family crimes and guilt, The House of Seven Gables is worth your time.
A Romance with a Moral
Hawthorne declares this book to be a romance. According to Hawthorne, the difference between a romance and a novel is that a novel must keep strictly to the details of reality and avoid all imaginative ideas. While in a romance, the author is free to manipulate the atmosphere of the book and to mingle the past with the present as long as he is true to the human heart. He does say that it is possible to go overboard with the liberties of a romance and suggests that the manipulation be done with care.
Hawthorne also declares his moral in the first few pages of the book writing that “the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones...[becoming] a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” It is the psychological implications of his moral that create the action of this story about two families the Pyncheons and the Maules. The action is not that of literal movement but that of ghosts. The ghosts that haunt the Pyncheon family are not supernatural beings brought on by the curse of Matthew Maule but the deeds and sins of the generations passed down from father to son.
It is not until the descendents on both sides of the feud, both Maules and Pyncheons, deliberately break with the attitudes and behaviors of their ancestors (ancestral crimes, if you will) that the past is laid to rest and the families can enter the future.
In Conclusion
If you are looking for action, do not pick up The House of Seven Gables, it will only frustrate you. However, if you like a book where the mood and emotional mindset of the characters is conveyed in every minute description prepare to sit back and absorb this novel.
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