The House of the Seven Gables

"The House of the Seven Gables is a deeply psychological novel set during the 1840s in Salem. It’s the story of the Pyncheons, an old New England family loosely modelled on Hawthorne’s own, and it’s a story of the place they build and occupy. The house itself is a character; a cursed character because the ancestor who built it essentially stole the land the house stands on by accusing the rightful owners of witchcraft. Like much of Hawthorne’s work, it’s a meditation on the way in which the past and the present intertwine in New England, and I believe it’s Hawthorne at his best. “It’s Hawthorne at his best” Hawthorne is at times wrongly characterized as stuck in New England’s colonial past. Although you’re right to say its focus is inward, it is also attuned to contemporary. Recall that one of the most important characters is a daguerreotypist, an expert in the new art of photography. And, in the most dramatic part of the plot, the railroad offers a way to essentially escape the past. So, Hawthorne mediates back and forth between his present and the past. You’re right; many people are tied to their past. But I try to demonstrate in The City-State of Boston that there is something about the compact size of New England and the centrality of so many places in it to the national narrative that makes New Englanders self-conscious about their past. The original sin part is important. In House of Seven Gables witchcraft persecution is the original sin. In a story called “Young Goodman Brown” Hawthorne confronts the extreme violence between New England Puritans and indigenous people head-on. Puritan colonists believed in the concept of original sin; that’s important to understanding New England and to New England’s understanding of its past."