The House of the Seven Gables Analysis

Obviously, the biggest symbol in this novel is the House of the Seven Gables itself. Hawthorne helps us out with this one by putting it right there in the title! The house represents a ton of thin...

It's pretty rare that the central symbol of a book is also the setting, but that's the case with The House of the Seven Gables. For more on the gloomy, twisted Pyncheon home that provides the backd...

The narrative voice of The House of the Seven Gables is totally bizarre. The narrator has total access to all of the internal feelings of the characters; in fact, it often feels like a third-person...

Pyncheon family's treacheries and troubles are the main subject of this book, so we think we're justified in calling The House of the Seven Gables a family drama. It's also Gothic fiction because...

Hawthorne has an incredible gift for descriptive passages, and some of his paragraphs about the Pyncheon garden make us feel as though we're burying our faces in roses as we read. But his love of d...

Hawthorne loves words; he rolls around in them like a happy pig in a mud puddle. You can tell how much he enjoys playing with language in nearly every passage of The House of the Seven Gable. Let's...

The House of the Seven Gables is the central organizing symbol of this novel. It stands in for tons of things: the Pyncheon family as a whole, the Pyncheon family's fight with Matthew Maule, the Pa...

The last chapter of The House of the Seven Gables is weirdly...happy. First off, the whole public now knows that Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon is dead, and no one blames Hepzibah or Clifford. Indeed, they...

Hawthorne loves a good word, and he won't use one when he can use ten. All the same, he's pretty clear about spelling out the themes and consequences of his Pyncheon family drama. The House of the...

At the start of the novel, Hepzibah Pyncheon has been living shut away in her house for the past 30 years and Clifford Pyncheon has been in jail.The House of the Seven Gables does not start out i...

The "monster" in The House of the Seven Gables is the evil, greedy spirit of Colonel Pyncheon, which travels down the Pyncheon line to Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. At the start of the book, siblings Hep...

At the start of The House of the Seven Gables, Hepzibah and Clifford are living in hell. Hepzibah has walled herself up in her family home, living in cold, dilapidated gentility, and Clifford has b...

Nathaniel Hawthorne published his first novel, Fanshawe (1828) anonymously and at his own expense. He was so embarrassed by its poor critical reception that he actually burned all of the unsold cop...

There is nothing in this book that would bring a blush to Hepzibah's cheek. It's 1851 in Puritan-influenced Massachusetts, so Hawthorne's not going to be giving us anything remotely steamy.

The New England Primer (1777) (2.15)Chanticleer (rooster name used in medieval tales) (6.5, 6.6, 10.10-11, 10.13, 12.5, 14.35, 21.11)Alexander Pope, " The Rape of the Lock " (8.3)Richard Steele (e...