Status Updates From House of the Seven Gables

I have to admire Hawthorne’s commitment. That sack of shit, Judge Pyncheon, is a corpse rotting in the House and he devotes an entire chapter to roasting him as if he is sarcastically admonishing him for not keeping with his schedule, then there’s the chapter of horror where he juxtaposes the dead Judge with life moving along as usual, at first unaware of the fact that there is anything amiss in the mansion.

rarely have I read a book where so little happens within so many pages. The end of Alice’s story is pretty good. The Maule feud turns into a blood feud with guilty parties on both sides. If there was any doubt as to Holgrave’s ancestry, it’s clear when he nearly hypnotized Phoebe. I am surprised, though, that the villain bites the dust at this point in the novel. Well, the obvious villain.

Blah blah Clifford, blah blah Holgrave. Holgrave’s almost maniacal sentiments regarding the past—a renunciation of ancestry—has a certain poeticism during his “Dead Man” soliloquy. Mostly, it’s leading up to his personal narrative regarding the fate of Alice Pyncheon. I’m not sure but I suspect that Holgrave is one of Maule’s ancestors, whether he knows it or not.

Fifty pages and we introduce one new character (even if we spend a bit more time with the obvious villain): Clifford, Hepzibah’s brother, once an artistic and dainty youth but now an infirm old man. this book is fine when it is depicting Hawthorne’s sort of melodramatic scenes but the broad swathes of generalized descriptions of the life of the household go ON and ON

At this point this story is very low key. The enchanting Phoebe has arrived from the country and is enriching her aunt’s life by running the shop for her and cooking and other such things that the pseudo-noblewoman could not hope to succeed at. Hawthorne demonstrates a belief in the Puritan work ethic, tempered by the idea that such work must grow out of the worker rather than be coerced.

"There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds"

On the one hand, Hawthorne sure loves to talk. On the other, I love that this story has the room to breathe. The Scarlet Letter moved in play-like acts and broad expository swathes. We are fifty pages in and just now getting to our first character, the elderly Hepzibah, working the 1850s version of a dollar store out of her family’s mansion (because of a 30 page history and a 10 page character sketch).

I can not stress enough how off putting a love confession with my dead uncle in the next room over would be