Name: The House Of The Seven Gables
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN: 9783849672270

The House Of The Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Author Description

This book, which the author himself preferred to his previous novel, is of quieter tone than "The Scarlet Letter." It is more minutely elaborated, and its pathos depends more on the peculiar temperaments of its characters. The scene is laid in Salem, and the house, which much effort has been made to identify, corresponds in many points to an old dwelling formerly standing there, known as the Curwen House, and sometimes called "the old witch-house." Some points in the story corresponding to the history of the Hawthornes were noted in the beginning of this sketch. The character of Clifford and the problem of his strange destiny, the mockery of fate, which, having adapted him so delicately to an existence of sensuous refinement, stripped him in his youth, at one brutal stroke, of everything fair in life, and threw him among the lowest and coarsest surroundings, is the great study of the book. Its pervading thought is the theory of inheritance, the repetition of an original type now and then down a family line, and the curse of wrong-doing, blasting innocent lives when wronger and wronged are dust. The characters of Hepzibah and Phoebe are beautiful types, strongly contrasted on the surface, but having at bottom an intimate kinship in moral uprightness and capacity for devotion. That of Judge Pyncheon also is exquisitely worked out in the subtle self-deception of the hypocrite,—no character being so great a favorite in fiction, and none so often badly drawn, as that of the hypocrite, because it looks so much more easy and uncomplicated than it is.

Page Count:
192

Publication Date:
2018-01-01

Publisher:
Jazzybee Verlag

ISBN-10:
3849672271

ISBN-13:
9783849672270