Nathaniel Hawthorne creates in his fiction a sense of American history as a weight on characters in his present, holding them to certain values, visiting upon them the guilt of their ancestors, and linking them to a continuity beginning and continuing on American soil. In The House of the Seven Gables, the key issue hanging over the characters in the present is the way their ancestors made their wealth and the people they destroyed as they did so. The family in the present has inherited the guilt of that past and must either succumb to it or overcome it. The first possibility is represented by the house they seem unable to escape, and the latter is represented by an outside force that helps the family escape that house.
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 do 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.
At the beginning of the book, Hepzibah Pyncheon is an aging spinster who represents a more sophisticated and socially accepted past, though now her life and her ho...