How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
To a disposition like Holgrave's, at once speculative and active, there is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to become the arbiter of a young girl's destiny. Let us, therefore, – whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite of his scorn for creeds and institutions, – concede to the daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another's individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble. (14.2)
The moral difference between Mr. Holgrave and Judge Pyncheon becomes clear at this moment. It's not simply that Holgrave doesn't feel the lure of dominating other people. On the contrary, there is "no temptation so great" for him as the opportunity to control another. But Holgrave faces this temptation and refuses to do to Phoebe what Matthew Maule II does to Alice Pyncheon. He refuses to use her as a tool the way Judge Pyncheon might. Mr. Holgrave is strong enough to control someone else, but he chooses not to.
This choice is really interesting, because much of the novel seems to question whether Judge Pyncheon, for example, has any choice about what kind of person he is. The Pyncheon family passes down evil in its genes the way other families pass down blue eyes. So Mr. Holgrave appears to have much more freedom of choice than Judge Pyncheon. What are the differences between the two men that make this freedom possible for one and impossible for the other?
Quote #8
Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years. You are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from him! (15.41)
Here Hepzibah basically comes out and states the whole dilemma of fate in The House of the Seven Gables: Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has been fated to be "hard and grasping" ever since the foundation of the Pyncheon family 200 years earlier. He can't escape the inevitable.
Quote #9
Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meeting-houses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own. (17.10)
Even though Clifford has expressly stated that he hates newfangled things (especially "the steam-devil" (11.2), i.e., the train), now that he is free of Judge Pyncheon, he is fully embracing the new. The shift of setting in Chapter 17 from the House of the Seven Gables to this new railway line symbolizes the way in which Hepzibah and Clifford have suddenly shaken free of the past. They have suddenly joined the rest of society – even if the rest of society still doesn't entirely understand either of them. Hawthorne comments on this sudden action: "after so long estrangement from everything that the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current of human life [...] as if by the suction of fate itself" (17.6).