RIP X: The House of the Seven Gables

By -
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne


My first RIP title!  Considering that it's a Hawthorne title, I was surprised at how fast it went--time-wise, that is.  It's not terribly long.  I did feel like not all that much happened, though, and that it's crammed with a little too much excessive verbiage.  So it felt a bit slower than it was.

The Pyncheon mansion is famous in town for being large and fancy--seven gables!--and for having a family curse.  Way back in Puritan times, old Pyncheon accused one Matthew Maule of wizardry in order to get his land, and the house was built on the site of the swindle.  Maule cursed the whole Pyncheon family, and the old man died in a sudden and gruesome manner.

Moving up to the present--1850 or so--the house is mouldering away with only one inhabitant: the destitute but genteel Hepzibah, who is forced to open a little shop in order to support herself.  She is terrible at shopkeeping, but luckily for her a young cousin, Phoebe, arrives and whips the shop and the house into shape.  Just in time too, for Hepzibah's brother Clifford is finally released from thirty years imprisonment, and he needs help.  But what did Clifford do, and what old secrets are yet to be divulged?

There are some hints of witchcraft and other supernatural events, but they are more suggestions than anything else.  Everything could have a perfectly natural explanation.  Or perhaps not.

Hawthorne's story was based on a fanciful rendition of his own family's curse.  He was himself descended from a judge of the Salem witch trials, and that came with both guilt and a story about a curse.  The house was loosely based on a real Pynchon mansion as well (author Thomas P. being descended from them).

The novel made a hit, causing sensation on both the US and England.  H. P. Lovecraft used it as inspiration and called it the best of New England Gothic literature.

It's not my favorite Gothic novel ever written, but it's not bad either.  There's not quite as much plot as I'd like, and more extravagant descriptions of nothing much.

Comments

  1. Amateur Reader (Tom)September 20, 2015 at 6:38 PM

    One great chapter, I think, the "Governor Pynchon" chapter. Wipes out the rest of the book, except for the charming gingerbread shop chapter. Only Hawthorne would think these two chapters belong in the same novel.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanSeptember 20, 2015 at 9:14 PM

    Yeah, that was a neat part. He sits there all....day....long....and you get every bit.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousSeptember 24, 2015 at 6:55 PM

    Nice review! First time reading it and about 1/3 of the way through. Verbiage is right, but I do have to say, it helps me to see everything :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more