The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and . . . becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.”

     Last year I read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for the Transcendentalist event and quite liked it. This year The House of the Seven Gables is the last of the classics I read for the Classics Challenge.  The House of the Seven Gables is often called a Gothic romance or a Gothic horror. It actually is neither. Although there is a bit of an abrupt love story woven in, calling it a romance is too much of a stretch. Also, any supernatural element to the story is only very dimly suggested, never really played out.

     The story revolves around the seven gabled Pyncheon house, an old, melancholy mansion in New England with a bloody history. The present inhabitants of the house are Hepzibah Pyncheon who is a nervous old maid, her brother Clifford who is emotionally shattered from events in his past, their cousin Phoebe, a delightful young country girl and a mysterious daguerreotypist.  I’m not going to divulge too much of the plot because there really isn't much of a plot anyway.

     Hawthorne’s style of writing is not for everyone. It requires a fair bit of patience for the reader to wade through his long-winded and heavy prose. This verbose style worked pretty well in The Scarlet letter, lending real insight into the mind of the protagonist and even her tormentors. In The House of the Seven Gables though, it wore me out.  This explaining of every nuance and character trait was not only tiring but also slightly patronizing  I always prefer it when author leave us to figure out the characters for ourselves without spelling it all out. All in all, not my favorite classic of the year.

     And that’s it from me for this year. It’s been a hectic year with a lot of changes for our family. The changes were all good and for that I’m thankful, but it has meant that I've had a lot less time for reading and blogging. I’m hoping that 2013 will be more restful and leisurely. To make it easier on myself I've decided not to take part in any challenges or readalongs. I want my reading to be more spontaneous. I hope to take part in The Short Story Initiative as often as I can and perhaps any short term events I fancy that aren't too much pressure. I also hope to go a little easy on the classics next year and read more contemporary fiction. I don’t think I've read anything this year that was written in my lifetimeJ.

I wish you all Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year. I hope 2013 will bring joy and peace to all. See you next year.

The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

When I first decided to read Nathaniel Hawthorne for the ongoing Transcendentalist month (hosted by Jillian of A Room of One’s Own), I was thinking of reading The Blithedale Romance which, I believe is an openly anti-transcendentalist work and based largely on Hawthorne’s interaction with the transcendentalists (Nice review of it here). However, The Scarlett Letter has been on my TBR for ages now so I decided to give that a go first. I found that while it doesn’t mention or discuss Transcendentalism and its principles, it does take a diametrically opposite view of the human condition. While the transcendentalists believed in the inherent good in every human being, Hawthorne stresses on the heart of darkness that lies within every seemingly pure human. He implies that each of us is bound by the time and society that he/she is a part of and an individual cannot possibly transcend that. Hawthorne also mentions his time at brook farm in the introductory Custom-House Sketch and he clearly thinks the transcendentalists he encountered at the farm were well-intentioned but deluded.

The Scarlett Letter is set in a village in Massachusetts in the 17^th century. Hester Prynne, a young woman bearing an infant, is charged with adultery and is condemned to wear her shame in the form of the scarlet letter A on her bosom for the rest of her life. She refuses to name her partner in crime although the identity of the culprit is made obvious to the reader quite early on. There is also Hester’s wronged husband who conceals his true identity and torments his wife’s lover.  The product of the adulterous affair is a little girl named Pearl who is the personification of the scarlet letter, her mother’s shame and punishment.

There is an unrelenting pathos to the story that never lightens. All three of the principle characters are bound by their guilt, hating and pitying each other by turns. Hawthorne keeps redemption out of their grasp at all times. Even the child is almost used as an instrument of torture, tormenting her mother and even her lover. The atmosphere of the story is consistently grey and grim mirroring the sternness and joylessness of the puritanical society that it is set in. This is not to suggest that the book is boring. Never that. The characters and their internal conflicts are fascinating, as is the descriptions of 17^th century Massachusetts under the puritans. It’s an age and society that I haven’t read much of and I enjoyed this peek into it.

Hawthorne’s attitude towards women is very puzzling. On the one hand he does invest Hester with strength, capability and good sense and on the other he seems to reinforce the stereotype of an immoral Eve leading a virtuous Adam to sin and his ultimate downfall.  Still, Hawthorne was a product of a different era and it would be unfair to judge him by modern standards. Bottom-line is, he tells a powerful story and he tells it very well.