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The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginaryevents of this narrative. If permitted by the historicalconnection,—which, though slight, was essential to his plan,—theauthor would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature. Not to speakof other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible and exceedinglydangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancy-pictures almost intopositive contact with the realities of the moment. It has been no part of hisobject, however, to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with thecharacteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and anatural regard. He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending bylaying out a street that infringes upon nobody’s private rights, andappropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house ofmaterials long in use for constructing castles in the air.
Old Jaffrey Pyncheon
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Fusion Fest brings live music, dance, food, arts and the Salem community together at The Gables.
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The younger Matthew Maule is the grandson of Matthew Maule (the elder). The younger Matthew Maule makes a deal with Gervayse Pyncheon, telling him that he will tell him where the legendary deed is for the land in Maine in trade for the House of the Seven Gables. Using his powers of mesmerism, Matthew hypnotizes Alice Pyncheon, Gervayse's daughter, and conjures the spirits of Colonel Pyncheon, the elder Matthew Maule, and Thomas Maule.
Hepzibah Pyncheon
Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even inimagination, at a maiden lady’s toilet! Our story must therefore awaitMiss Hepzibah at the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, tonote some of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraintas to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they could beaudible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself. Alone, except for a certain respectable and orderlyyoung man, an artist in the daguerreotype line, who, for about three monthsback, had been a lodger in a remote gable,—quite a house by itself,indeed,—with locks, bolts, and oaken bars on all the intervening doors.Inaudible, consequently, were poor Miss Hepzibah’s gusty sighs. Inaudiblethe creaking joints of her stiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside.And inaudible, too, by mortal ear, but heard with all-comprehending love andpity in the farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayer—now whispered,now a groan, now a struggling silence—wherewith she besought the Divineassistance through the day!
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
The half-starved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of theirhiding-places, and sat on their hind-legs, snuffing the fumy atmosphere, andwistfully awaiting an opportunity to nibble. He vanished; and Phœbe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light, and thenthe steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On returning intoHepzibah’s apartment of the house, she found the low-studded parlor sodim and dusky that her eyes could not penetrate the interior. She wasindistinctly aware, however, that the gaunt figure of the old gentlewoman wassitting in one of the straight-backed chairs, a little withdrawn from thewindow, the faint gleam of which showed the blanched paleness of her cheek,turned sideways towards a corner. The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time;such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and seed-vesselsof vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their death than ever whileflaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed years would naturally havesprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices ofsociety) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings.
Phœbe’s Good-Bye
He was chiefly markedas a gentleman—if such, indeed, he made any claim to be—by therather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean linen. She at length withdrew her eyes from the darkcountenance of the Colonel’s portrait, heaved a sigh,—indeed, herbreast was a very cave of Aolus that morning,—and stept across the roomon tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing through anintervening passage, she opened a door that communicated with the shop, justnow so elaborately described. Owing to the projection of the upperstory—and still more to the thick shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, which stoodalmost directly in front of the gable—the twilight, here, was still asmuch akin to night as morning. After amoment’s pause on the threshold, peering towards the window with hernear-sighted scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenlyprojected herself into the shop.
Judge Pyncheon’s son
She was the more inclined todevotion from the grim aspect of the chamber and its furniture, especially thetall, stiff chairs; one of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as ifsome old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had vanishedonly just in season to escape discovery. In his younger days—for, after all, there was a dim tradition that he hadbeen, not young, but younger—Uncle Venner was commonly regarded as ratherdeficient, than otherwise, in his wits. In truth he had virtually pleadedguilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such success as other men seek, andby taking only that humble and modest part in the intercourse of life whichbelongs to the alleged deficiency. But now, in his extreme oldage,—whether it were that his long and hard experience had actuallybrightened him, or that his decaying judgment rendered him less capable offairly measuring himself,—the venerable man made pretensions to no littlewisdom, and really enjoyed the credit of it.
Saddest of all, moreover, thelover was none the happier for the maiden’s granted kiss! But, ratherthan swallow this last too acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of theshow. All the antiquefashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were characterized by arudeness that would naturally have annoyed his fastidious senses. He loved theold rumbling and jolting carts, the former track of which he still found in hislong-buried remembrance, as the observer of to-day finds the wheel-tracks ofancient vehicles in Herculaneum.
Maule’s Well
It was quite otherwise with Hepzibah; the Judge’ssmile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart like sunshine upon vinegar,making it ten times sourer than ever. And then the unnerved man—he that had been born for enjoyment, but hadmet a doom so very wretched—burst into a woman’s passion of tears.It was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent, and,to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From this mood, too,he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at Hepzibah with a smile, thekeen, half-derisory purport of which was a puzzle to her. Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle of theshop-bell made itself audible.
Hawthorne's Shadow Audio Tour
A shadow of awe andhalf-fearful anticipation—nobody knew wherefore, nor of what—hadall at once fallen over the company. From England, especially, came many warm expressions of praise,—a factwhich Mrs. Hawthorne, in a private letter, commented on as the fulfillment of apossibility which Hawthorne, writing in boyhood to his mother, had lookedforward to. He had asked her if she would not like him to become an author andhave his books read in England.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gripping psychological drama concerns the Pyncheon family, a dynasty founded on pious theft, who live for generations under a dead man’s curse until their house is finally exorcised by love. Hawthorne, by birth and education, was instilled with the Puritan belief in America’s limitless promise. Yet – in part because of blemishes on his own family history – he also saw the darker side of the young nation. Scott Fitzgerald, Hawthorne peered behind propriety’s façade and exposed the true human condition.
The girls began to accuse people, starting with three neighborhood women. The fervor took hold of the community and with a growing number of imprisonments resulting, the newly appointed Massachusetts governor (Sir William Phips) convened a special court to try the accused. In the months that followed, one hundred and fifty arrests were made, and many people were imprisoned. In the end, twenty individuals were hanged for the crime of practicing witchcraft. Hawthorne's great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the three judges to preside over the trials. In 1711, the Massachusetts General Court financially compensated the families of some of the victims and their families for the wrongdoing.
Judge Pyncheon’s property passes to Hepzibah, Clifford, and Phoebe (and to Holgrave through Phoebe). They decide to leave the House of the Seven Gables and live on Judge Pyncheon’s country estate. In a secret recess behind Colonel Pyncheon’s portrait, Clifford and Holgrave discover the worthless deed to the old territory in Maine. Holgrave reveals that he is a descendant of the Maule family and that the location of the deed had been passed down to him through his ancestor Thomas, the carpenter, who built the recess and hid the deed there.
His gold-headed cane,too,—a serviceable staff, of dark polished wood,—had similartraits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself, would have been recognizedanywhere as a tolerably adequate representative of its master. Thischaracter—which showed itself so strikingly in everything about him, andthe effect of which we seek to convey to the reader—went no deeper thanhis station, habits of life, and external circumstances. One perceived him tobe a personage of marked influence and authority; and, especially, you couldfeel just as certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bankaccount, or as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and,Midas-like, transmuting them to gold. It was overpoweringly ridiculous,—we must honestly confess it,—thedeportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the publiceye.
After a very briefinspection of his face, it was easy to conceive that his footstep mustnecessarily be such an one as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aimas a child’s first journey across a floor, had just brought himhitherward. Yet there were no tokens that his physical strength might not havesufficed for a free and determined gait. The expression of his countenance—while, notwithstandingit had the light of reason in it—seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearlyto die away, and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame which wesee twinkling among half-extinguished embers; we gaze at it more intently thanif it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly upward,—more intently, butwith a certain impatience, as if it ought either to kindle itself intosatisfactory splendor, or be at once extinguished. Phœbe recognizedit as the same which had passed upward, as through her dream, in thenight-time.
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