House of the Seven Gables

    
House of the Seven Gables
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
read: 2013
Guardian 1000 Novels

Random thoughts that don't really have anything to do with each other:

Over the summer, I moved to Salem, Massachusetts, where Nathaniel Hawthorne is from. The House of Seven Gables is a prominent landmark, but there's scant reason to think it's the actual building Hawthorne was referring to in this book. In addition, Hawthorne had already moved to Western Massachusetts before writing House of the Seven Gables.

In television they have a concept of a "bottle episode," where all the action takes place on one set. House of the Seven Gables is almost a bottle novel, with virtually all the action taking place in the titular house. This also gives it almost a theater feel.

In The Crucible, Arthur Miller writes of the puritans who initially settled Salem, "These people had no ritual for the washing away of sins." This theme of original sin shows up generations later in this novel, as shown here in this description of Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon's character:

And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless youth, he had committed some one wrong act,--or that, even now, the inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least, blameless ones,--would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which were heaped into the other scale!

The main theme of the novel as described by Hawthorne in the introduction is about sins of the past being visited on present generations. This takes added weight when you realize that one of his ancestors was a judge who presided over the Salem Witch Trials. Perhaps Hawthorne himself feared paying the price for his great-great-grandfather's sins?