The House of the Seven Gables

"God," said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,—"God will give him blood to drink!" After the reputed wizard's death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp.

Hereditary curse architecture—Maule execution, Colonel's mysterious death, Clifford's imprisonment, Judge Pyncheon's tyranny, the Judge's sudden death, flight from the accursed house—gothic inheritance plot with a late romantic reversal, so plot scores 85.

"How do you like the face?" asked Hepzibah. "It is handsome!—it is very beautiful!" said Phœbe admiringly. "It is as sweet a face as a man's can be, or ought to be. It has something of a child's expression,—and yet not childish,—only one feels so very kindly towards him!"

Hepzibah the proud spinster shopkeeper, Clifford the broken aesthete, Phœbe the restorative cousin, Holgrave the radical lodger, Judge Jaffrey the smiling villain, Uncle Venner the benign outsider—each Pyncheon generation a moral type under the same roof, so cast scores 87.

Now, in that very house, to be the hucksteress of a cent-shop. This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate recluse.

Domestic gothic tempo—shop-window days, garden conversations, the slow accumulation of atmosphere before the Judge's death accelerates the close; middle chapters dwell in symbol rather than event, so pace scores 78.

The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily into the great ancestral chair. Many a former Pyncheon had found repose in its capacious arms: rosy children, after their sports; young men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with business.

Hawthorne's allegorical density—the house, the well, the portrait, the elm—every object a moral emblem; prose that instructs through atmosphere and qualified judgment rather than action, so prose scores 90.

A natural spring of soft and pleasant water—a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the Puritan settlement was made—had early induced Matthew Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village.

The seven-gabled mansion as living curse—Maule's well, the cent-shop, the garden, the ancestral chair—American gothic space where architecture holds memory and guilt; Salem/New England history embedded in every beam, so world scores 92.

"God," said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,—"God will give him blood to drink!" After the reputed wizard's death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheon's grasp.

The Preface's Custom-House frame and Ch.I's curse legend—Colonel Pyncheon's blood-stained house-warming—immediately establishes hereditary doom before the present-day cousins appear, so hook scores 85.

Alone, except for a certain respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line, who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remote gable,—quite a house by itself, indeed,—with locks, bolts, and oaken bars on all the intervening doors.

The American romance as moral allegory of inherited wealth and guilt; Holgrave's radicalism and daguerreotype modernity set against Pyncheon aristocratic decay—gothic adapted to republican class anxiety, so innov scores 86.

The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon—after witnessing what had passed—was now singing in heaven.

Flight from the house, marriage, elm prophecies—romantic resolution that lightens but does not fully dispel the curse; Uncle Venner's benediction closes the gothic with qualified hope, so ending scores 83.