May 12 Nathaniel Hawthorne – House of Seven Gables

Sometimes I read a classic because I want to learn what all the hubbub was about, or want to feel all learn-ed (edu-ma-cated), sometimes it’s simply for fun. Why not? I’m not in school anymore, so I can put it down any time I’d like and won’t fail the test.

But usually I pick it up because something in the synopsis sounds interesting. In this case, the House of the Seven Gables – a title I’d heard bandied about in relation to dry American History – was said to be a ghost story, but not just any ghost story, a story that inspired H.P. Lovecraft. Well, okay, then it must be…SCARY!!! I mean, he had his unfortunate prejudices (I haven’t dug far enough into the Lovecraft library to run across them, but read books inspired by him to see that they were there), and as does this book as well. But I can’t fix the past, I can only view it with an understanding of what I know now.

Anyhow, I started reading excited to witness firsthand one of the first, American classic ghost stories.

Well, so far it’s not very ghost-like, though there seems to be promise of future scariness. We have a creaky, old mansion in an old New England town. A great estate that was as close to a castle as America can come, presided by a family that is as close to royalty as America will come. It was established by a severe Puritan (according to the story, the actual house was founded by merchant shipbuilder) who had enough wealth to force a farmer off his land in order to make way for his grand estate. The farmer gets accused of witchcraft (Hawthorne has a theme that he seems to stick to) and it’s heavily implied that it was the Puritan who did so in order to get his land. But Hawthorne doesn’t accuse anybody and certainly doesn’t repudiate the farmer, instead he implies that he’s not a bad witch, but good one – until crossed. Dum, dum, dum! He is of course sent to the scaffold, but his last words curse the family. They will drink blood! Okay, I’m on board, that sounds scary.

And then the story slows down. We journey to “present day” New England to meet the soggy, ancient descendant of the Puritan, Hepzibah, and her sunny, happy-go-lucky cousin the very cute (she’s very Hello Kitty) Phoebe. Not exactly sending chills down my spine, but there’s a family curse, so I keep reading. Things have to go down hill, right? (Aren’t I terrible?)

I like and dislike Hawthorne.

Hawthorne was a master of the allegorical tale. And he is quite good, but it’s allegory and… Let me put it this way, it’s not at subtle. Allegory is the favorite type of trope in medieval tales, that, oh, so current and sophisticated story telling with such exciting favorites like, “Tales of the Everyman” with a story about about a man who is, bet you can’t guess, an average guy named Everyman. It does have it’s own sort of sophistication, but can be seen as kind of simplistic next to more modern literary devices.

Evil personified is played by the Devil and Death personified is played by, well, you know who. One of the heavenly virtues, Patience, is played by a person who seems as if she could wait forever and not even need to stream anything to keep her boredom in check. One of the Seven Deadly sins, Gluttony is a really heavy dude who can’t stop eating (I don’t want to tell you what Lust looks like – got to keep this family friendly). In allegory, a thing or person stands for an idea, the comparison is pretty direct, but it’s so that the narrator can talk about big ideas – like the after life and the meaning of life (most medieval stuff was religious). The Wikipedia definition goes like so, “a literary device [in which] a character, place or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences…typically…to convey complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to it’s viewers, readers or listeners.” (I did a bit of paraphrasing there, but that’s the gist of it.)

So, when in Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in the Scarlett Letter has a red letter A sewn to her dress for committing adultery and watches the off-spring of that affair turn a cartwheel in her red dress looking like a letter, we all know which letter. There are a few examples of his less-than-subtle allegories in House of Seven Gables: the painting of the Puritan forefather fading into black, almost disappearing into the woodwork – the fade somehow enhancing his severe frown (whoah, almost didn’t catch that one).

Some of the allegories in Seven Gables are like getting hit over the head with a jackhammer….

“There were curtains to Phoebe’s bed; a dark antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been rich, even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the girl like a cloud, making night in that one corner, while elsewhere [in the room] it was beginning to be day….[Morning light] Finding the new guest there — with a bloom on her cheeks like the morning’s own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as when an early breeze moves the foliage –the Dawn kissed her brow. It was the caress which a dewy maiden–such as the Dawn is, immortally–gives her sleeping sister…” Very obvious. The House of Seven Gables is an ancient, but doomed house (and that’s more of an allusion to the family that resides within it, than the building itself).

Hepzibah, the Puritan’s direct descendant and the keeper of the estate, makes her first sale at the shop and feels, achem, sullied by it (because the nobles of New England didn’t work – they presided). She runs out of the shop and asks god to forgive her.

“Doubtless, God did forgive her. But, taking the inward and outward history of that first half-day [oh, no, she had to work an entire half day!!] into consideration, Hepzibah began to fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her temporal welfare.” This was Hawthorne’s heavy handed way of saying, “Capitalism corrupts.” There’s nothing subtle about “her ruin moral and religious” – what, wait? Yup, bad things are beginning to coalesce around her shop. Oh, yeah, and this is very likely also foreshadowing, which is also pretty obvious “it would prove her ruin” is like saying, “okay, here’s the plan….”

And some allegories are more mild…

“A light portion [of the white roses the grew beneath her window], had blight or mildew at their hearts…” Good if obvious.

“These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and, aided by these, Uncle Venner’s casual attempt at encouragement kindled a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her brain.” Pretty good, Hepzibah is being compared to the house, by the way.

“And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little pellets of his already uttered wisdom…” He gives her lots of advice and finally tells her to smile, nobody likes a sad girl. Super. (Don’t worry she sighs at this because she knows how useless that advice is.)

This one is interesting because Phoebe is a descendant of the Puritan, you know, the guy who took down his enemy by accusing him of witchcraft. The Puritan hated witchcraft, was the opposite of a witch, right?

“Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place… No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim…Phoebe’s waste, cheerless and dusky chamber, which had been untenanted so long –except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and ghosts….” Pretty good. Notice the choice of words – “magic”, “witchcraft” – that’s not by accident.

And this one’s just downright insulting and pretty obvious.

“Besides the rose-bush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one another’s development (as is often the parallel case in human society) by their uneducated entanglement and confusion.”

But this one was actually…pretty wonderful: “…poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even less creditably, as a shopkeeper, than in her earlier efforts. She appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a half-conscious slumber. She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague eyes about the shop; proffering them one article after another….There is a sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself, as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like death, without death’s quiet privilege; its freedom from mortal care.”

But I want to leave with the end of an earlier chapter, because it is really beautiful. It’s not an example of allegory, but it is an example of something that you read in great books: an observation on life that’s so astute, so beautiful and real, that you always take it with you. And I guess that’s why everybody likes Hawthorne. (Though my favorite is still his short story “Young Goodman Brown”. REALLY scary!)

This quote is preceded by Hepzibah, the town’s “royalty”, having to lower herself to petty shopkeeper – due to her poverty (guess that’s what happens when you don’t work). But this next quote seems like a way for the narrator to comfort her, and perhaps the rest of us working stiffs as well.

“Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majestic which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.”