Important Quotations Explained
1. [T]hey
. . . hinted that he was about to build his house over an unquiet
grave. . . . The terror and ugliness of Maule’s crime, and the wretchedness
of his punishment, would darken the freshly plastered walls, and
infect them early with the scent of an old and melancholy house.
By building his house on land stolen
from Matthew Maule, Colonel Pyncheon has purportedly cursed himself
and his family line for as long as they live in the house. This
passage from Chapter 1 illustrates how deeply
the curse and the house are intertwined. The crime is depicted as
actually affecting the house’s infrastructure—it works itself into
the house’s very fabric. These rumors are of course only murmurs
from the village gossips. Hawthorne makes sure to attribute the
speculation only to gossips, so that he will later remain free to
explore the notion that the Pyncheon family, rather than the house,
is responsible for the curse that plagues them.
The passage also sets up some of the book’s most important themes
and stylistic traits. First, it provides the groundwork for the idea
that each generation inherits the vices and misdeeds of its predecessors.
Hawthorne repeatedly links the many awful misfortunes of the Pyncheon
family to Colonel Pyncheon’s crimes. Hawthorne can make claims about
curses and haunted houses, as he does in the quotation above, because
by choosing to write a “romance” rather than a “novel” he has free
reign to combine the mystical and fantastical with the bloody truths
of reality. Hawthorne presents the disastrous results of sin as
strong enough to pervade both time and space: sin’s effects persist
centuries after Pyncheon’s wrongdoing, and they are severe enough
to stain the very walls of his family’s home. Hawthorne conveys
the intensity of sin’s effects with ominous eerie language characteristic
of the Gothic style in which he writes. Many words in the passage
above evoke this ominous tone, such as “grave,” “terror,” “ugliness,”
“wretchedness,” “darken,” “infect,” “old,” and “melancholy.”
2. This
being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing
to be happy . . . this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of
the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung,
by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor.
There, as he lay more than half-lifeless on the strand, the fragrance
of an earthly rosebud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will,
had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing
beauty, amid which he should have had his home.
Throughout the novel, Clifford is a
difficult, sometimes unpleasant character, and this quotation from
Chapter 9 conveys how his once beautiful
mind has so thoroughly gone to waste. The quotation beautifully
and tragically chronicles how thirty years in prison have caused
his mind to degenerate. The image of Clifford “half-lifeless” on
the sand, captivated by the scent of a rose, illustrates the terrible suffering
that accompanies his return and his sense of having missed out on
his youth. The tone is one of exhaustion, but it is also one of recovery,
for the image does not end with Clifford’s drowning but with his
slowly coming back to consciousness. As we have seen in other aspects
of the novel, in the chickens returning to health and the garden’s
restoration, decay and renewal are linked. Hawthorne’s poetic portrayal
of Clifford’s degeneration makes us inclined to sympathize with
Clifford and helps us to understand why his recovery moves at such
a slow pace.
Hawthorne’s language makes Clifford’s incarceration seem
like a violent, almost overwhelming struggle rather than merely
an extended absence. His use of words like “forlorn,” “frail,” -“tempestuous,”
and “miserably” helps to convey the severity of the tribulations
that Clifford has endured. He has been delivered from a “shipwreck”
to a “harbor.” The passage ends with words that conjure pleasure,
comfort, and hope: “living,” “breathing,” and “beauty.”
3. “[I]t
will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times—to Death,
if we give the matter the right word! . . . We read in Dead Men’s
books! We laugh at Dead Men’s jokes, and cry at Dead Men’s pathos!
. . . Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man’s
icy hand obstructs us!”
In Chapter 12,
Holgrave utters these words with revolutionary fervor, as he outlines
the folly of humankind being slaves to the past and to the future
death that awaits us all. Here Holgrave proposes that society’s
very foundations are made up of the works of dead men—that the modern
world is shaped by people who no longer inhabit it, stifling all
contemporary urges and desires. These laws and theories, Holgrave
says, are smoothed and rectified by later generations, but this
is not enough, and he advocates tearing down all of society’s institutions—from
the courtroom to the home—and beginning again with a clean slate.
Holgrave’s politics nicely echo the novel’s theme of the tyranny
of the past, where Pyncheons and Maules are unable to escape the
influence of their dead relatives. Holgrave, himself a Maule and
a possessor of both the Maules’ secret and their formidable power
of mesmerism, argues that it is foolish to accept fate passively,
that legacies like his need to be overthrown and rebuilt from scratch.
4. [A]n
individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall and stately
edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately in his
own view, is no other than the man’s character, or the man himself.
Behold, therefore, a palace!... [I]n some low and obscure nook .
. . may lie a corpse, half-decayed, and still decaying, and diffusing
its death-scent all through the palace! The inhabitant will not
be conscious of it; for it has long been his daily breath! . . .
Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man’s character,
and of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses, to his
life.
This passage from Chapter 15 addresses
the complex character of the Judge, who is charming and self-assured
on the outside but thoroughly rotten on the inside. Hawthorne does
not attempt to understate the power of the Judge’s station and charisma;
on the contrary, he likens these to a “palace,” a building of noteworthy
opulence and splendor. The secret, this passage implies, is not
that this palace is a sham, but that it has been irrevocably corrupted
by a rotting corpse locked deep inside, hidden so completely that
even the Judge has forgotten that it exists. This gloomy Gothic
portrayal helps to establish the theme that the current generation
inherits the flaws and errors of past generations. Here the rotting
corpse becomes a physical embodiment of the perils of legacy. The
palace is infested with the smell of a rotting ancestor, and no
one even notices or thinks to root out the problem.
5. “A
man will commit almost any wrong—he will heap up an immense pile
of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh heavily
upon his soul, to eternal ages—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered
mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable
in. He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one
may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall, and, after
thus converting himself into an Evil Destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren
to be happy there!”
This dialogue, spoken by Clifford in
Chapter 17, neatly sums up the “moral” of The
House of the Seven Gables, which states that the sins committed
over the course of constructing a family fortune will bring the
sinner and the sinner’s descendants more misery than wealth. In
identifying the builder of the house as the cause of the misery
the house has perpetuated, Clifford leaves no doubt that Colonel
Pyncheon is to blame for the family’s misfortunes, and that his
unchecked desire to accumulate wealth has brought him misery instead.
This passage insinuates that the Colonel may not be motivated exclusively
by selfish greed. The idea that the Colonel may have built the house
“for his posterity to be miserable in” is certainly a pessimistic
interpretation, but it raises the idea that the Colonel acts with
future generations in mind. Obviously, the Colonel’s intentions
go horribly awry, but the generous notion that he is building for
someone other than himself does give him a glimmer of paternal appeal
and serves as a testament to Hawthorne’s willingness to lend even
the most villainous characters a touch of moral ambiguity.
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