The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The House of the Seven Gables was a hard one for me to get through, but I didn't dislike it. It's just very densely written and the drama is more of the psychological sort, so it takes the kind of concentration that I don't always have at ten o'clock at night when I'm winding down for bed with a book.

I can't even remember why I picked this one up. I think I saw it in the bookstore, and realized that I haven't really visited 19th century American literature since high school, and remembered liking The Scarlet Letter better than Moby Dick, and thought that since I had actually seen the real-life inspiration for the seven-gabled mansion on a visit to New England I ought to finally read the book. It took me awhile to get through, and subsequently put a lot of other reading on hold, and although I wouldn't necessarily add it to my favorites I enjoyed it well enough and am glad I read it.

As the title would suggest, the story is about the house, and about the ghosts that have been haunting the house and its resident family, the Pyncheons, for almost two hundred years. There is not much in the way of page-turning plot. Rather, the book is about how the last remaining members of the dwindling family each deal with these ghosts and how the family's past haunts each individual's present.

The ghosts are only figurative, and to me one of the most interesting things about the book was Hawthorne's treatment of the supernatural. I once had the impression that The House of the Seven Gables was a ghost story, but it is not. Hawthorne never even tries to let the reader believe that events mysterious or portentous have anything other than natural origins. But at the same time, he does not discredit the supernatural. The meaning ascribed to strange circumstances is very real and nontrivial to the characters who might ascribe meaning.

For example, at one point in the story the strains of a piano from somewhere in the house hark back to a tragic figure in the family's past, one Alice Pyncheon. Could it be the ghost of Alice, returned to her music? wonders Hawthorne for the reader's sake, before he assures us that the abrupt end to the music is unlike what we would have heard from Alice when she was living. This music could only come from Clifford, one of the house's living residents. Still, the allusion to Alice tells us something about the weight of the stories of prior generations on the stories that are playing out now. And the juxtaposition between Alice and Clifford shows the tragedy of Clifford's own life in a way that a simple description would not.

This novel is no Tess of the D'Urbervilles. There is sadness and there is tragedy, but there is also an undercurrent of hope that will pay off for the patient reader in the end. Hawthorne's character development and psychological analyses are a reflection of an era, and some of them did not resonate with me the way they may have with readers in the mid-18th century. But the characters nevertheless felt very real, and I cared about them. The language sounded a little pretentious for modern ears, but Hawthorne wrote the book over a century and a half ago and I was willing to let him get away with it. In fact, when I was able to give my full concentration to the text, I really enjoyed his use of words that I rarely see in context, and even a few that were completely new to me (eleemosynary anyone?).

I have no problem taking issue with classics. But while this one was kind of a slog for me to get through, the more I think about it, the more I like it. Would I recommend it? I'm not sure. You have to really be in the right mood. But it was definitely an interesting read, and I think a worthwhile one.