The House of the Seven Gables
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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.
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the house and the circumstances of this story and if anything becomes a little less "sunny" as a consequence:
Phoebe's primary function in the story is to serve as an instrument of renewal for the house and the characters, but she is also somewhat changed by tribulation, mellowed and saddened into womanhood, more suspicious of authority (Johnson 76).
Phoebe operates on several different levels, and as Crews notes of Hawthorne's work (including this one), "the banal theme is rooted in psychological relationships of considerable subtlety" (Crews 184). On the most apparent level, Phoebe represents a sort of innocent and youthful energy and beauty as well as a domestic competence that has not been hindered by any brooding over the meaning of things such as others in her family manifest:
Her Pyncheon blood endows her marriage to Holgrave-Maule with familial symbolism, but in fact she is antithetical to most of the Pyncheon traits, and her effect on the ancestral propertyu is to cancel or reverse many of its dark implications (Crews 186).
Crews notes that Phoebe aligns herself with all the symbols of purity amid the general collapse of the family, with the singing birds and the unpolluted fountain in the garden. Crews also fi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2076
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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