The_House_Of_Seven_Gables

The House Of Seven Gables “The sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtle and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. Loosely based on the events of Hawthorne’s own life, The House of the Seven Gables attempts to show the suffering of descendants forced to repent for the sins of their “father”, while they are unknowingly renewing the curse by nurturing the ancestral greed that has passed through the generations. Thus the various themes of the novel reflect the central idea of continued sin through the greed and guilt of a declining family. Each generation struggles to escape the sins of the past, only to be thrust forcefully back to face the offenses of their forefathers. The House of the Seven Gables is a tale of loneliness and greed caused by the sin of preceding generations. The opening of the novel is set in puritan times during the Salem witch hunts. The villainous Colonel Pyncheon wrongly accused the innocent Matthew Maule of witchcraft so that the Maule land would fall into the Pyncheon family’s hands. Upon his death, Maule “addressed [Colonel Pyncheon] from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy...God will give him blood to drink". The physical wrongdoing of house, seven, gables, pyncheon, jeffrey, family, clifford, phoebe, hepzibah, maule, colonel, through, greed, death, own, darkness, light, holgrave, generations, generation, characters, within, past, old, novel, curse, upon, time, theme, hearts, hawthorne, children, wealth, very, sin, rather, one