The House of the Seven Gables
1851
The House of the Seven Gables
1851
Three generations of Pyncheon sin have calcified into a rotting Salem mansion, its seven gables brooding over a family cursed by a stolen deed and a witch trial judge's cruelty. Hepzibah, the last of her line, opens a cent-shop in the front parlor, her faded gentility wracked with humiliation, while her brother Clifford languishes under the shadow of their ancestor's crimes. When young Phoebe arrives from the country, her fresh presence begins to dissolve the house's long paralysis, but the past won't stay buried. Judge Pyncheon, the family's prosperous current incarnation, looms with quiet menace, and the mansion's hidden secrets threaten to swallow what remains. Hawthorne builds his Gothic masterpiece with exacting prose that finds beauty in decay, weaving Puritan guilt into something that feels both ancient and startlingly contemporary. The novel asks whether the dead can ever truly release the living, or if some wounds only pass downward through time.
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“Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self!””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-house-of-the-seven-gables-841ba6f4-f28b-47e7-a1b0-ee00957ce779.Hawthorne, N. (1851). The House of the Seven Gables. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-house-of-the-seven-gables-841ba6f4-f28b-47e7-a1b0-ee00957ce779Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-house-of-the-seven-gables-841ba6f4-f28b-47e7-a1b0-ee00957ce779.
