If you can read WALDEN and get excited, you can read THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES and enjoy it a lot, though it moves a little slower. There's a happy ending, a very happy ending, but the way to the ending is through The House of Death, because that's what The House of the Seven Gables is: The House of Death. A rich man's will has given it to a couple of his poor relatives, and it's dragging them down. The relatives are old; one of them has been in prison thirty years for murder; his sister is so poor she's having to open a penny-store on the ground floor (it would be a dollar store today) to keep herself alive.
Having to work for the first time in her life will help save her. So will the cheerful young Phoebe, a cousin who comes to visit and stays to help with the store. So will the garden outside, which has hens, flowers, humming-birds ... a little bit of life. Hawthorne describes the garden to save us from the house, but he says, "The author needs great faith in his reader's sympathy; else he might hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents so trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this garden life. It was ... Eden."
But for all the slow time he spends in the garden, he spends five times as much slower time in the house. The most famous chapter in the book is a fifteen-page address the author makes to a corpse in the house's most important room. The point of the speech is that the corpse won't be going to dinner as night, as planned, won't become governor, as planned, won't double his money, as planned ...
Meanwhile the ex-convict and the sister who has never left the house before are running away by train at a mile a minute. That was all described in the previous chapter, the one before the address to the corpse. Are they running from the law? No. They're running from the house. The house stops life. The house slows everything down to a crawl, and then down to absolute paralysis. That's Hawthorne's big point: such houses, and the ancestry they represent, must be escaped from. The sister, "by secluding herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is in fact dead," says a boarder, a Daguerrotypist, who ends up being the novel's hero.
The hero looks on at the ex-convict and his sister. He tells the hard-working cheerful Phoebe, "It is not my impulse--as regards these two individuals--either to help or hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been dragging its slow length over the ground, where you and I now tread. If permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction within me, that the end draws nigh."
Phoebe answers him, "I wish you would speak more plainly ... and above all, that you would feel more like a Christian and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress, without desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them?" So, as it turns out, the heroine does more to save everyone from the house of the seven gables than the hero does.
But what does she do? She is cheerful, she has faith, and she waits. The house has been waiting for two hundred years. She waits just a little longer.
----- -----
People who complain that this book is slow are missing its main point. It is as slow as death, and it is meant to be. Someone has pointed out that the mile-a-minute railroad trip isn't necessary to the plot. No. It's necessary to get away from the slowness of the house -- and there is no plot, because there is no movement, and there is no movement because lack of movement is death, and death is what the book is about.
Somebody else has said that he knew right away that Hawthorne was addressing a corpse in Chapter XVIII, and figured Hawthorne was pretty stupid not to think that readers would guess the character was a corpse long before the chapter ended. But readers should have guessed that all the characters in the house were corpses from the very first paragraph of the book--and there, perhaps, Hawthorne was just a little bit ahead of them.
Not that it's a sad book. It's slow, but it's never sad. The happy ending happens, but it's no spoiler to tell about it, because how it works that everything turns out so well is never explained, and readers have been arguing about exactly how everything got fixed from 1851, when the book was published, until today.
There's a fair amount of scary Gothic action, too: corpses and curses and false convictions ... but they all happened something like five lifetimes ago. The nightmares turn out to be dreams, and the dreams turn out to be traps. People who like horror stories know how slow horror should be.
This is not a fast-paced story. It is not even a slow-paced story. It is a story that doesn't move at all, and it took a genius to slow it so far down that it stopped -- and then keep telling it.
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Reviews with images
A Classic that Stays With You
Beautifully written with intense, haunting, and extraordinary style as only Hawthorne can deliver. Thought-provoking and timeless. A gift for the ages!
Top reviews from other countries
Digital Panache
Perfect Classic
Reviewed in India on November 26, 2018
Digital Panache
Reviewed in India on November 26, 2018
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Sunny Spot
Wonderful 19th century novel. In my opinion better than The Scarlet Letter.
Reviewed in Spain on November 21, 2014