The House of Seven Gables

A spooky classic for October. This reminds me of a Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House' but with more to say about the human mind and situation than I remember from Hill House. The psychology that Hawthorne presents here for his characters is most impressive. No matter who the character, Hawthorne can seamlessly create an inner life: what comes with Hepzibah's solitude. The prison of the mind that comes after the incarceration of Clifford. At times I could relate to Hepzibah, Clifford and Phoebe. The ending seems to wrap a little too conveniently and perfectly for everyone, but Hawthorne's delving into so many minds was worth it. So much more here than "the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones".

What can I say? I thought this book was a great Gothic novel that was very apposite for a Halloween read. One thing that contributed to this being a wonderful reading experience for me is now that I’m finished with the 999 challenge I really treasured the leisurely pace of the story and the long, lush sentences. I loved the way the characters were revealed bit by bit, often with little homilies on their quirks. For those who are looking for a fast paced thriller with twists and turns in the plot this is not the book to choose. If you enjoy stories that are built on atmosphere and character with some philosophy thrown in for good measure I recommend this as a fine example of that type of novel. I also have to admit, that sometimes I show more suspected that Hawthorn was writing with a little “tongue in cheek” attitude toward the reader and having a sly laugh on us—or perhaps inviting us to laugh with him. show less

“The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within”...

Anthropomorphic from the first page, a theme of that will be revisited and augmented throughout, this is how Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the structure that can be considered the title character in his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables. The opening chapter is so full of Gothic dread and supernatural nuance that readers attuned to weird fiction are immediately drawn in. Hawthorne spells out the accursed nature of the House, and the foreboding undercurrent in an eerie, show more ominous tone. And when Maule’s curse upon Colonel Pynchon is brought to bear so quickly upon the old family patriarch, we know that this is a most powerful curse indeed, to be carried across generations to come. But that level of intensity is not sustained throughout the novel. The plot is scant, and slow to develop. But Hawthorne shows his literary skills with illuminating characterizations, most notably the portrait of the old maid Hepzibah: a remarkable insight into the clockwork of misery and fear, insecurity and pain, anxiety and misgivings inside this tragic figure; and young Phoebe, who embodies sunshine, light, life, and hope, thereby standing in stark contrast to Hepzibah (and the house itself). Hawthorne’s writing is quite wordy, and while it sometimes enables that aforementioned depth of characterization, more often it seems unnecessarily labored. Recommended as an interesting, if flawed, early effort in the annals of supernatural literature. show less

Uma história de horror não precisa ter monstros, violência extrema e muito sangue para prender – ou afugentar – o leitor. Basta criar uma atmosfera de desconforto emocional, e é isso que faz “A Casa das Sete Torres”. Publicado em 1851, o romance do escritor norte-americano Nathaniel Hawthorne narra uma maldição que persegue uma família por quase 200 anos.
A história começa com um homem sendo acusado de feitiçaria, e chega ao presente com uma herdeira da família Pyncheon, idosa e solitária, habitando a antiga casa. Há apenas um inquilino vivendo em uma das torres, mas o contato entre eles é esporádico. Outros personagens vão surgindo, e algumas pitadas sutis de sobrenatural vão se agregando à trama em meio à show more densa atmosfera gótica criada pelo autor.
Bruxaria, solidão, cobiça, culpa, mentes atormentadas são temas que temperam a narrativa. A tensão é quebrada por um menino em um dos trechos mais saborosos da história – perdoem o trocadilho. E, claro, há lugar para amor e paixão. Justiça? Deixo essa resposta para os leitores.
Fato é que Hawthorne escreveu “A Casa de Sete Torres” inspirado na história da própria família. Há uma casa com essa característica em Salem, Massachusetts, onde o autor nasceu, e essa casa pertencia a Susanna Ingersol, sua prima. E não é coincidência o fato de que foi nessa cidade da Nova Inglaterra, Estados Unidos, que ocorreu a caça às Bruxas de Salem, em 1692. Antepassados de Hawthorne estiveram envolvidos na acusação de bruxaria a 200 pessoas. Catorze mulheres e cinco homens foram executados por enforcamento, uma idosa por apedrejamento.
A obra fez sucesso no seu lançamento, décadas mais tarde exerceu grande influência na obra de H. P. Lovecraft e teve várias adaptações para a televisão e cinema.
Curiosidade: A família Pyncheon também existiu, e é dela que descende o escritor norte-americano Thomas Pynchon.
Li “A Casa de Sete Torres” na tradução de Lígia Autran Rodrigues Pereira. show less

Hawthorne's follow-up to the masterpiece that is The Scarlet Letter feels more self-indulgent and less cohesive and fully developed than its predecessor. As a novel, it is constructed mostly of pictures than of characters that live and breathe--and what vivid pictures they are.

The characters of Phoebe and Holgrave serve as a tribute to his marriage-Phoebe is even the nickname he has for his wife, Sophia. But Holgrave is not much of a hero- though charming and enigmatic. We can imagine him very clearly as a young, beatnik Nathaniel who once lived in a Utopian experimental community and was friends with Henry David Thoreau. Phoebe is an idealized portrait embodying all of his wife's attributes. At the center of the novel stands poor show more Clifford and poor Hepzibah, siblings linked by the shackles of a gloomy old house. Within these shadows: Judge Pyncheon, a double for the murdered Pyncheon of the past, central to the curse and old negative energy that pervades this Gothic abode.

Hawthorne is exorcising his own ancestral past and the past of the inhabitants of Salem and the injustices that murdered so many witches and "wizards." The echo, God will give you blood to drink, reverberates and is given to the wizard Maule but was an actual quote by one of the condemned witches of Salem.

Still, what a treasure-trove of Symbolism and what Hawthorne is best at. Even the chickens in the backyard are a symbol....of hierarchies and class distinctions. Poor Hepzibah still sees herself as "a proper lady" but alas the world around her is a-changing.

This is a novel about the passing of the Old and the dawning of the New. And seen by its details, Hawthorne is brilliant. In one scene, he conjures the spirit world with an aliveness that is marvelous. Yet all the parts do not fit together as a cohesive whole in a way that would be more satisfying. The House of the Seven Gables is itself a symbol and a portrait more than a story.

There is so much to analyze here. It encompasses much of Hawthorne's philosophical musings on American culture and it prophesies somewhat the future--the New Dawn that was coming. It is a part of Transcendentalist literature and I feel much of what Hawthorne has to say is valid. show less

I wish I had been able to read this more slowly & with time to savor and reflect. Brilliantly written story, full of digressions and nature-inspired metaphors, touching on ideas of hereditary personality traits, whether a single evil act outweighs many good ones, and public opinion versus self-knowledge. I especially loved the character descriptions:

Colonel Pyncheon: "Endowed with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an objection to it."

Hepzibah Pyncheon: "She dwelt too much alone--too long in the Pyncheon house--until her very brain was impregnated with the dry rot of its show more timbers."

Clifford Pyncheon: "He was probably accustomed to a sad monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as stagnating in a pool around his feet." show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read 100 supposed "classics" for the first time, then write reports on whether or not I think they deserve the label

Book #2: House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The story in a nutshell:
Like any good horror story, the spooky House of the Seven Gables actually tells two stories at once: it is simultaneously the historic tale of the cursed Pyncheon family, concurrent owners of a reputedly haunted house in Salem, Massachusetts for over two centuries now, as well as the specific tale of the most recent show more generation of this family, dealing with the same curse that has haunted all the Pyncheons since Puritan times. It seems that the original owner of the seven-gabled house, old Colonel Pyncheon, ended up getting a man named Maule killed as a witch in order to weasel out of the construction costs of the house itself, even deliberately knowing that the man was innocent; Maule, it seems, as a result issued an infamous curse on the Pyncheon family as he died, one that has haunted any member in those two centuries who's had anything to do with the house in question. In the meanwhile, though, another persistent rumor has been that the Pyncheon family actually owns a whole lot more land in Salem than the simple Seven Gables estate, and that if they could simply find the 200-year-old evidence then they could get the state government to retroactively reimburse them and make them rich, rich, stinkin' filthy rich; and in that respect, House of the Seven Gables is as much a morality tale as it is a horror or haunted-house one, in that any Pyncheon over the decades who takes an interest in finding this old evidence just ends up obsessed with the subject to their ultimate ruin, as surely as the supposed magical curse that also exists, along the tormented ghosts of all those cursed Pyncheons who still supposedly reside within the house's walls.

Like I said, as a result the book ends up telling two stories at once, with the majority of it dedicated to the current Pyncheon family at the time of the story itself (mid-1800s): bitter spinster Hepzibah, for example, who has ended up having to open a cent-store on the first floor (basically the Victorian equivalent of a convenience store) in order to make ends meet; her elderly brother Clifford, a broken sad-sack who has just gotten out of jail after spending 30 years there for a crime he didn't commit; Judge Jaffrey, a haughty and hard old man who is thinking of running for governor, and who has become convinced that Clifford knows where the hidden Pyncheon real-estate evidence is; and the sweet-as-sunshine Young Phoebe, a rural cousin who is visiting that summer in order to help out this terminally dour family, and who is like a freakin' little rainbow compared to the rest of the family's endless thunderstorms. Combine with a lot of melodrama, a series of events that are semi-supernatural in nature, and a liberal sprinkling of backstory about the doomed Pyncheons of yore, and you have yourself one very Victorian novel indeed.

The argument for it being a classic:
As hinted above, the main argument for this being a classic is its historic nature; it is not only a fine example of the Victorian Novel (also known as the Romantic Novel), but indeed one of the first American examples of the genre to exist, at a time when American-born and -educated artists were just starting to make a mark on world culture for the first time in history. As such, its fans argue, House of the Seven Gables in effect becomes one of the very first American "weird" stories ever published, a subgenre within Romanticism that eventually led to such modern subgenres as horror, psychological thriller, science-fiction, mystery and more. Most people agree at this point that Hawthorne himself is an imminently important figure in American artistic history (mostly because of the perpetually loved and hated The Scarlet Letter), one of the first-ever US writers to have not only a global reputation but to argue for a distinctly "American" style of artistic expression; his fans, though, argue that he was not only this, but also one of a handful of people who began what is arguably the US's most prolific and ultimately important artistic output, the so-called "genre" projects that we seem so particularly damn good at.

The argument against:
The main charge that seems to be leveled at Hawthorne by his critics (and there's more and more of them in our contemporary times) is that his work simply isn't aging very well; that even though it's extremely important from a historical standpoint, there's also a reason that Hawthorne is so closely associated with the stereotypical "Victorian style" of narration, that has become so outdated in modern times. What's that, Dear Reader? You need more elucidation as to the nefarious nature of the Victorian style of narration? Perhaps if the more well-heeled in the audience will think of an overflowery style that directly addresses the intellectually curious in question, they will have more of a grasp over what Your Humble Narrator is dutifully trying to explain. Yeah, now imagine 200 pages of that, and you start to understand the rationale behind the critics' claims that this novel is important historically but not necessarily a classic.

My verdict:
After reading House of the Seven Gables myself, I tend to fall on the side of its critics; the manuscript itself certainly is a flowery mess to modern eyes, with a plotline lacking the modern "oomph" that we contemporary genre fans are used to and expect from genre projects. In fact, this is arguably the most interesting thing about it in our modern times, and the main argument for a horror or mystery fan to still read it, is to see the actual evolution of so-called "spooky stories" in this country. The fact is that this novel is not very scary at all, not very spooky or weird either from the standpoint of how we modern audiences define it; there are some hallways that creep people out, the general feeling of gloom and doom that the eponymous house emits, and of course the central curse driving it all, but is otherwise a fairly conventional morality tale about how one should be happy with the things one currently has in life, not just endlessly yearning for what's not there.

It's fascinating for anyone who's read a broad depth of weird American literature from over the decades, because you can very plainly see the starting point for the genre's maturation; you can literally see the things that ended up inspiring people such as Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft, which were the things that then inspired people such as Stephen King and Clive Barker, which is what's now inspiring a whole new generation of genre writers. It's definitely an interesting intellectual exercise for anyone seriously interested in the history of strange literature in this country, but otherwise a book that can safely remain unread by most without having to feel guilty on one's deathbed.

Is it a classic? No show less