Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables tells of the Pyncheon family and the curse that was visited upon it. The novel is complex and has engendered a good deal of discussion about its themes, its characters, and the society depicted by Hawthorne, all related to Hawthorne's sense of American history and of the legacy of Puritanism. Much of the history of the Pyncheon family is a history of evil in the New World as various Pyncheons betray their own and to whatever they have to to acquire property and to protect that property. The women of the Pyncheon family show a dichotomy that Hawthorne explored in much of his fiction, a tension between the strongly individualized woman who tries to make her way in the world through her own ability and the society in which she lives, a society which defines women as subservient and inferior. Certainly, New England at the time of this novel (and extending into its past) was such a society, and the way Hawthorne portrays Phoebe and Hepzibah shows the effects such a society can have on women. A comparison of the two women shows how they try to cope with the roles they have been given.
Hawthorne cannot be identified as a feminist in any formal sense, but he did express concern and understanding for the woman whom we might today call an incipient feminist. Women in Hawthorne represent certain values, as do the males:
The males in the long works are oversocialized rather than isolated, timid, conventional, and repressed. The women represent the values of passion, creativity, self-assertion, and sincerity. Though the values change, positive values continue to be associated with women throughout Hawthorne's career (Baym 224).
The Pyncheon women in The House of the Seven Gables are bound by the same bonds that hold the men, the bonds of the past, and for Hepzibah that past has a palpable form in the shop she takes over, a shop which becomes her primary connection to the outsi...