“The House of the Seven Gables” by Nick Ares is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Adapted by Clay Zuba.
Soaked in Greed, Violence, and Genocide
It’s where you and I live. We try not to talk about it. We don’t like to look at it. We pretend not to feel its long, dark, pervasive presence. But no matter how we deny it, we live in the shadow of the House of the Seven Gables.
When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his second novel, House of the Seven Gables, in 1851, he knew that he, and all his fellow Americans, live in such a shadow.
At the novel’s outset, in 1692 Salem, the wealthy and powerful Colonel Pyncheon accuses the poverty-stricken Matthew Maule of witchcraft. Pyncheon covets a piece of prime real estate that Maule had acquired decades before Salem became a prosperous shipping hub, but which Maule occupies and refuses to sell him. Based on Pyncheon’s accusations, Maule is convicted and hanged, but not before he utters, “Thou shalt have blood to drink,” thereby casting a curse on Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs.
Unperturbed, Pyncheon builds a family mansion on the land he has just stolen through deceit and violence. On the same day the house is finished, Pyncheon is found dead with blood running from his lips. Generations of Pyncheons will occupy the House of the Seven Gables, but all are inescapably cursed by their progenitors’ initial sin of greed and violence. At least one from each generation dies mysteriously with blood on their lips.
Just in case the thematic significance isn’t obvious, Hawthorne explicitly states his theme in the novel’s introduction. House of the Seven Gables illustrates “the truth,” writes Hawthorne, “that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” To paraphrase Hawthorne, yet use language that he, as a descendant of the Puritans, would surely approve:
we live in the shadow of our ancestors’ sins.
Hawthorne hoped, as he wrote elsewhere in the novel, to “convince mankind . . . of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.”
A Country Divided
Writing in a country divided North and South by the specter of slavery, East and West by the horrors of native genocide, Hawthorne knew his country was soaked in greed and violence. Indeed, literary scholars have long recognized that the novel’s titular house functions as a symbol of the United States’ legacies of slavery and genocide; and of class, race, and gender warfare; all of it in the name of greed. Hawthorne was thinking of himself, and of many of us, quietly living as innocently as possible while we live off the “accumulated mass” of our ancestors' “ill-gotten gold, or real estate.”
Crimes Are Personal
As an avid student of history, Hawthorne knew that the crimes of his time were grounded in those of the past. He recognized with shame, that his ancestors had entangled him in their dark shadow.
Hawthorne’s paternal great-great-great grandfather, Major William Hathorne (1606-1681), participated in the Pequot War of 1637. He even fought in the infamous Mystic Fort Massacre, where English soldiers burned alive the women and children of the Pequot tribe. In 1638, John Winthrop, then governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, claimed that the Pequots were “thoroughly extinguished.” Modern scholars have described the Mystic Massacre as an early act of American genocide against indigenous peoples.
Hawthorne’s paternal great-great-grandfather, Justice John Hathorne (1641-1717), served as one of the primary magistrates who presided over the Salem Witch Crisis of 1692. Unlike several of the magistrates who served on the court, Hathorne never expressed any contrition for imprisoning 150 citizens and executing 25 people, 20 of whom were women, to death. Hawthorne wrote in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850) that his ancestor “made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him.”
John Hathorne’s brother, Captain William Hathorne (1645-1678), fought in King Philip’s War of 1675-1676, in which the Narragansett leader Metacom led an Indian alliance to resist colonial expansion. Historian Jill Lepore has characterized King Philip’s War as America’s first race war in her 1998 Bancroft Prize-winning book The Name of War.
Tried To Escape By Changing His Name
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s descendants, then, participated in some of early America’s most notorious crimes against its own citizens and its neighbors. Hawthorne was so uncomfortable about being descended from these men that he added a “w” to modify his name from “Hathorne” to “Hawthorne.” In doing so, he sought to orthographically distance himself from their crimes against humanity.
Hawthorne knew that merely changing his name would not enable him to escape the shadow of his ancestors. House of the Seven Gables is, in part, an attempt to grapple with his family legacy. He based the character of Colonel Pyncheon on his own ancestor Major William Hathorne, and symbolizes the United States as a nation through the novel’s titular house. Indeed, the house’s seven gables are an unambiguous allusion to the seven sins of the Christian religion. We are, based on this symbolism, a nation built on sin.
We share in the crimes of our ancestors. Hawthorne’s ancestors committed unjust acts of violence against women and genocide against Native Americans. Hawthorne’s contemporaries, our own ancestors, enslaved millions of Africans, committed genocide against hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, killed through unjustifiable warfare tens of thousands of Mexican citizens, and initiated the still-accelerating destruction of the continent to conquer the territory that is now the United States. Without these actions, the United States could not enjoy its place of wealth and prominence in the world today.
One need not accept Hawthorne’s language of sin to accept the thematic truth of his novel. The truth of Hawthorne’s vision remains all about us: in the racism and gender inequalities that pervade our criminal justice and education systems and our housing market; in the income inequality between white men and women, and between white people and people of color; in healthcare disparities and environmental injustice. The shadow of the House of the Seven Gables extends as far as we can see.
Why Do We Continue To Ignore The Shadow?
It seems to be a part of our nature to ignore the shadow. We pretend it does not exist. We vehemently deny its impact on our lives. Even Hawthorne proved vulnerable to this predisposition.
In the same pages that Hawthorne moralizes to us against forgetting that we feast on the riches of our ancestors’ sin, the author erases some of them. In the pages of his novel, Hawthorne depicts the House of the Seven Gables as being built with free labor, but in 1692 such a house would have most likely been built with labor stolen from enslaved Africans, if not also Native Americans. In fact, Hawthorne derived his inspiration from the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, which now operates as the House of the Seven Gables Museum. As the Museum itself has acknowledged, at least five enslaved people labored at the house.
Hawthorne describes Matthew Maule, the man whom Colonel Pyncheon accuses of witchcraft to steal his land, as “the original occupant of the soil.” This characterization is obviously quite false. Hawthorne would have been well-aware that the original occupants of the soil were the indigenous peoples whom his ancestors displaced through violence. At the time of European colonization, the Naumkeag band of the Massachusetts people occupied the land that would become Salem. The Massachusetts were largely destroyed by the English during King Philip’s War, the same war in which Hawthorne’s ancestor Captain William Hathorne gained fame and fortune. In calling Matthew Maule the original occupant, Hawthorne commits an act of historical erasure against indigenous peoples.
In writing my first novel, “Murder in the House of the Seven Gables” (M7G), I sought not just to reengage 21st-century readers with Hawthorne’s works, but to reinsert our national legacy of violence and genocide against people of African and indigenous descent into the Hawthorne’s world. M7G is a gothic murder mystery that reexamines the mysterious circumstances surrounding Colonel Pyncheon’s death. I depict the House of the Seven Gables as built and maintained through African and indigenous labor, against a backdrop of violence against indigenous peoples, to offer readers a more realistic account of the house’s origins.
In the posts that follow I’m going to continue to make my case for the continued importance of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. In the process, I’ll also be arguing for the relevance of this once-canonized, and now oft-vilified author and his ideas, as well as that of early American literature, and its forms and themes, in general.
It might not sound that exciting right now. But you’ll see, reader. Soon, you’ll see.