Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables

Though the values change, despotic values continue to be associated with women throughout Hawthorne's career (Baym 224).

The Pyncheon women in The House of the vii Gables are bound by the akin bonds that give birth the men, the bonds of the past, and for Hepzibah that past has a palpable form in the shop she takes over, a shop which becomes her primary connection to the outdoor(a) existence. Hepzibah is contrasted with her niece, quintuple, a member of the puppyisher generation and a young woman with ideas of her own. The two women symbolize and play out the rent of all the Pyncheons--the past in the person of Hepzibah attempting to control and hold the younger generation of the present to a tradition, to a curse, to sins that happened immense ago. Hepzibah has been an accomplice in her own bondage by screen herself in the shop. She is a spinster and of course has never married, which would feed bene an escape from the Pyncheon family, at least directly. Her demeanor is imposing and would attend to legion(predicate) to leave her looking cross, though Hawthorne says this is misleading:

Her scowl. . . had make Miss Hepzibah a very ill office, in establishing her voice as an ill-tempered old maid. . . (Hawthorne 36).

At the point where we endure Hepzibah, she has just taken a positive step toward the away world, toward escape from the confines of the Pyncheon house, by reopening and refurbishing the shop star

Susan Van Zantzen Gallagher analyzes the novel in terms of a tradition extant at the time of its writing, the tradition of the national novel. Such novels typically focused on the growth and using of a female protagonist who has been abandoned by her family in some way so that she must go into the world to earn her own living and develop her own relationships. The heroine of this fount of novel promotes personal relationships over materialistic concerns, and she is often interpret in comparison to two other personality types--the static women and the exploitative woman.

The setting is usually that of a house, and the novelists will conservatively describe the interiors and exteriors of the building (Gallagher 3).

In the structure of the novel, though, Hepzibah is only a mock-heroine and serves as a passive foil to Phoebe's active domesticity. Hepzibah is presented as inept at household chores. Phoebe is defined by her contrast to Phoebe, and Phoebe is the true heroine:

Her Pyncheon blood endows her marriage to Holgrave-Maule with familial symbolism, but in fact she is antithetical to most of the Pyncheon traits, and her magnetic core on the ancestral propertyu is to cancel or reverse many of its dark implications (Crews 186).

Crews notes that Phoebe aligns herself with all the symbols of purity amid the general present of the family, with the singing birds and the unpolluted fountain in the garden. Crews also finds that Phoebe served to refute sexual cynicism:

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 caveman (Hawthorne 40).

Gable, H.L., Jr. "Kaleidoscopic Visions: Images of the Self in The House of the Seven Gables." Arizona Quarterly (Spring 1992), 109-135.

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