When it was first erected, the House of Seven Gables typified the mechanical Colonel Pyncheon; but it developed through the years until, by Hepzibah's time, it has become humanized and almost organic. The history of the house is thus a record of continuity and change. Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a study of guilt and renewal from generation to generation. At the time of the Salem witch trials, the patriarch of the Pyncheons covets the property of a tradesman and manipulates public opinion so as to get Matthew Maule hanged for witchcraft and acquire the land. The dying man's curse on the Pyncheon family comes true generation upon generation and relationships between the families are colored forever by this "original sin." That is, until six generations later when the long-hidden truth is revealed. The House of the Seven Gables is Hawthorne's most humorous novel, it is also the work in which he is most serious in his devotion to the powers of beauty and imagination and his hatred of economic materialism and Philistinism.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864) was a novelist and short story writer. He wrote many classic novels including The Scarlet Letter, Tanglewood Tales, Twice-Told Tales, and The House of the Seven Gables.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Gordon Tapper’s Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables
Secrecy, history, crime, and retribution: These subjects fascinated Nathaniel Hawthorne from the very beginning of his career, and they merged with particular force in his third novel, The House of the Seven Gables, which Hawthorne wrote during 1850 and 1851 while enjoying his first flush of celebrity as the acclaimed author of the recently published The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne was at this time forty-six years old, with more than two decades of writing behind him, having produced close to one hundred meticulously crafted works of short fiction, many of which grapple with the nature of evil, the reverberations of the past, and the psychological ramifications of sin. And yet, despite this impressive output, Hawthorne was exasperated with how long it had taken him to achieve literary fame. “How slowly I have made my way in life!” (quoted in Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, p. 367; see “For Further Reading”) he complained shortly before Seven Gables appeared in April 1851. In part, however, this delay in public recognition was self-imposed, a result of Hawthorne’s congenital reserve. He had in fact begun his career at the auspicious age of twenty-four, when in 1828 he published Fanshawe, though he was so dissatisfied with this derivative novel that he did his best to suppress it. More significant, however, were the stories he began placing in periodicals in 1830, yet all of these early works were published anonymously, and it was not until the 1837 appearance of Twice-Told Tales, his first collection of stories, that Hawthorne was identified as author of any of his texts. Although unsigned publication was fairly common during this period, Hawthorne was more reluctant than most writers to bring this anonymity to an end. Moreover, just as he concealed his name from the public, his fiction is pervaded with secrets and unresolved ambiguities. In his disturbing tale “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for instance, the mysterious veil worn so stubbornly by the protagonist is, on one level, a fictional echo of the psychological barrier that Hawthorne himself was loathe to remove. After his death in 1864, even his wife Sophia declared that “to the last he was in a measure to me a divine Mystery, for he was so to himself” (quoted in Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life, p. 380).
Born into a family that traced its lineage to the Puritan settlements of New England during the 1630s, Hawthorne was imbued from a very early age with what he termed “a home-feeling with the past” (“The Custom House,” p. 7). This pronounced historical consciousness merged in Hawthorne’s writing with an attraction toward the shadowy recesses of human nature. Herman Melville—with whom Hawthorne developed a remarkable friendship during the 1850s—identified this strain in his fellow writer’s work as a “great power of blackness” (Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, p. 1159), a faculty that Melville attributed to Hawthorne’s preoccupation with the Calvinistic theology of his Puritan ancestors, with its unforgiving emphasis on the doctrines of innate depravity and original sin. Hawthorne was, however, deeply ambivalent about the legacy of Puritanism. On the one hand, his fiction reproduces the rigorous inspection of conscience so central to Puritan theology, yet it also often satirizes the ideological intolerance and class inequities that Puritanism helped spawn in the United States. This divided view of Puritanism and its foundational role in shaping the national culture are precisely what lend Hawthorne’s fiction much of its depth and complexity.
Hawthorne’s obsession with the nation’s colonial origins was inextricable from his equally intense absorption with his family heritage. As he puts it in his journal, “the spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty in me” (quoted in Wineapple, 231). The first of these ancestors to emigrate from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony was William Hathorne, who arrived in Salem in 1636 and played a prominent role in colonial politics, serving as selectman and speaker of the House of Delegates. This forefather was especially admired by his descendants for his indomitable will, which was epitomized by his defiance of King Charles II’s command to return to England in order to answer for colonial disobedience. As Hawthorne confides in his autobiographical essay “The Custom House,” written just one year before he composed The House of the Seven Gables, this ancestral figure was “invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur . . . present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember” (p. 6). Yet if this patriarch stirred the imagination of the young writer-to-be, he also filled Hawthorne with shame for the less noble acts recorded in colonial annals, such as his persecution of the Quakers, which included commanding that a woman be publicly whipped as punishment for her religious nonconformism. Hawthorne was both intrigued and troubled by the fact that this “persecuting spirit” (“The Custom House,” p. 7) re-emerged in the next generation through the actions of Colonel John Hathorne, who earned notoriety as one of the judges presiding over the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, which involved the prosecution of hundreds and the execution of twenty individuals. For Hawthorne, this recurring impulse to victimize others was disturbing, not only because it compounded his sense of inherited guilt, but also because it suggested that the propensity to sin is transmitted across generations just as surely as physical traits. In Seven Gables, he explores more thoroughly than anywhere else in his fiction the chilling possibility that evil is historically determined, the consequence of an inescapable family legacy.
Not surprisingly, Hawthorne responded to his family’s role in national history with a contradictory mixture of reverence and revulsion, and this deeply felt engagement with the past led him to become what Michael Colacurcio has called a “moral historian” (The Province of Piety, p. 13) of American culture.
Born into a family that traced its lineage to the Puritan settlements of New England during the 1630s, Hawthorne was imbued from a very early age with what he termed “a home-feeling with the past” (“The Custom House,” p. 7). This pronounced historical consciousness merged in Hawthorne’s writing with an attraction toward the shadowy recesses of human nature. Herman Melville—with whom Hawthorne developed a remarkable friendship during the 1850s—identified this strain in his fellow writer’s work as a “great power of blackness” (Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, p. 1159), a faculty that Melville attributed to Hawthorne’s preoccupation with the Calvinistic theology of his Puritan ancestors, with its unforgiving emphasis on the doctrines of innate depravity and original sin. Hawthorne was, however, deeply ambivalent about the legacy of Puritanism. On the one hand, his fiction reproduces the rigorous inspection of conscience so central to Puritan theology, yet it also often satirizes the ideological intolerance and class inequities that Puritanism helped spawn in the United States. This divided view of Puritanism and its foundational role in shaping the national culture are precisely what lend Hawthorne’s fiction much of its depth and complexity.
Hawthorne’s obsession with the nation’s colonial origins was inextricable from his equally intense absorption with his family heritage. As he puts it in his journal, “the spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty in me” (quoted in Wineapple, 231). The first of these ancestors to emigrate from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony was William Hathorne, who arrived in Salem in 1636 and played a prominent role in colonial politics, serving as selectman and speaker of the House of Delegates. This forefather was especially admired by his descendants for his indomitable will, which was epitomized by his defiance of King Charles II’s command to return to England in order to answer for colonial disobedience. As Hawthorne confides in his autobiographical essay “The Custom House,” written just one year before he composed The House of the Seven Gables, this ancestral figure was “invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur . . . present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember” (p. 6). Yet if this patriarch stirred the imagination of the young writer-to-be, he also filled Hawthorne with shame for the less noble acts recorded in colonial annals, such as his persecution of the Quakers, which included commanding that a woman be publicly whipped as punishment for her religious nonconformism. Hawthorne was both intrigued and troubled by the fact that this “persecuting spirit” (“The Custom House,” p. 7) re-emerged in the next generation through the actions of Colonel John Hathorne, who earned notoriety as one of the judges presiding over the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, which involved the prosecution of hundreds and the execution of twenty individuals. For Hawthorne, this recurring impulse to victimize others was disturbing, not only because it compounded his sense of inherited guilt, but also because it suggested that the propensity to sin is transmitted across generations just as surely as physical traits. In Seven Gables, he explores more thoroughly than anywhere else in his fiction the chilling possibility that evil is historically determined, the consequence of an inescapable family legacy.
Not surprisingly, Hawthorne responded to his family’s role in national history with a contradictory mixture of reverence and revulsion, and this deeply felt engagement with the past led him to become what Michael Colacurcio has called a “moral historian” (The Province of Piety, p. 13) of American culture.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great condition, too many shipping companies,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The House of the Seven Gables (Barnes & Noble Classics) (Paperback)
The book arrived in good condition, well-wrapped but I would hesitate to buy from here or anywhere again which uses DHL and then transfers the order to another company for delivery. The order was going from Texas to Calif, and could have reached here in just a few days if it had been just given to the USPS. Instead it traveled one and a half times around the country with DHL (according to the tracking record it went from Texas to Kentucky then finally to California, where it was given to USPS to deliver.) Yes, it arrived within the 19 days window, but that was a very silly route to take. At the same time another order of mine came from the east coast to here in only 3 days directly with the USPS. I've since heard from others that DHL is only convenient for global orders not domestic. Never again.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
|
|
