Question

One of the main themes of this novel is appearance vs. reality. Discuss how the idea of appearance vs. reality affects life decisions, both in the past and today. Include examples to support your answers. (The House of Seven Gables)

Answer 1

Answer: This theme is the “moral” of The House of the Seven Gables, as Hawthorne states in the Preface, and he takes many opportunities to link the misdeeds of Colonel Pyncheon to the subsequent misfortunes of the Pyncheon family. The Colonel’s portrait looms ominously over the action of the story, and the apoplectic deaths of three separate Pyncheons clearly fulfill Matthew Maule’s curse on the Colonel: “God will give him blood to drink.” Old Jaffrey Pyncheon and his nephew, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, are both found dead with blood coating their shirts and beards, linking their deaths to that of the Colonel. Aware that the notion of an inherited curse is fantastic and perhaps inappropriate for an otherwise realistic novel, Hawthorne breaks literary convention just so that he can pursue the idea that the crimes of one generation can have awful repercussions for succeeding ones. In the Preface he emphasizes that The House of the Seven Gables is a “Romance” rather than a “Novel,” allowing him to include the fantastical elements that pervade the novel. Hawthorne portrays the disastrous results of sin as indelible. Even centuries cannot make the stain of the Colonel’s sins go away: though the primary action of the novel takes place almost 200 years later, the Pyncheons still feel the effects of their ancestor’s crime.

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