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Title: The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne ISBN: 0-553-21270-2 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: July, 1987 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.53 (43 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: In response to the negative reviews...
Comment: I must say that the negative reviews that I have read about Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables are sorely off the mark. The prevalent sentiments are that the plot is dull (or almost absent), the characters are flat, and the description is overwrought. But you who say this are simply missing the point, as well as taking Hawthorne's work out of context. You have to understand that this novel was written during a very transitional period in literature. Writers had shifted from the Enlightenment to Romanticism (the period in which Hawthorne writes), and as Hawthorne writes his novels, another movement is being made to Realism. Realism is what we are used to in modern fiction. It contains real characters and real events. But Hawthorne had not yet fully employed these new ideas, and he still hung on to the Romantic sentiments. Therefore, he was much more interested in ideas rather than character development (a modern technique). Hawthorne chooses to convey ideas, emotions, morals, etc. rather than fully developed the characters like they would be in a novel today.
As for no plot, you have to keep in mind that Hawthorne still looks to the old tradition (not to mention his guilt of his heritage), so he uses his writing as a way to teach moral lessons, not necessarily to describe a highly detailed story and plot.
Finally, I can't deny that there is plenty of narrative description, but most of it serves a great purpose, and for the parts that you think do not belong, just read and enjoy them for their poetic beauty and technical merit.
Hawthorne is a fantastic writer, but to acknowledge this, the reader must not take his work out of its context.
Rating: 2
Summary: Hawthorne's Six-And-A-Half-Gable Surplus
Comment: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables today enjoys unshakable status as one of the brighter stars in the firmament of American literature. Though praised by Hermann Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, and other respected authors and critics at the time of its publication in 1851, many of today's readers may question the novel's reputation for greatness. Was it one of the first substantial novels by an American author? Where Americans of the era, tired of bowing to European cultural tradition, hungry for a literary hero of their own? Undoubtedly. Coming more than twenty years after the bright, crisp style of Washington Irving, the regressive House of the Seven Gables reads like the kind of tiresome classic many people dread being forced to confront in higher education classes, for the book feels more like the product of the 18th rather than the 19th century. Like the balance of Irving's short stories, The House of the Seven Gables is set a century earlier than the period in which it was written, thus making comparisons with Irving even more difficult to ignore.
The major problem with The House of the Seven Gables is that its story could be told by a shrewder and less indulgent author in one tenth of its 268 somnolent pages. Hawthorne worked within the framework of a specifically chosen plot and theme, yet the novel, taken page by page, appears to be about almost nothing: there seem to be vacuums between the words, voids between the sentences, gulfs between the paragraphs. Hawthorne considered this work a romance, and there are some suitably gothic shadows, but, if in fact a romance, The House of the Seven Gables is the flattest major romance in Western literature. Though its plot elements include a corrupt judge, accusations of witchcraft, the hanging of a sorcerer, a poisoned well, and a murderous, disembodied hand, the tone throughout is tepid and airless.
Structurally, the novel is disastrous. Elderly Hepzibah Pyncheon, one of the last members of a declining New England family, is opening a small penny goods shop on the lower floor of the seven - gabled house in which she lives in solitude. Now financially destitute, Hepzibah bravely faces down her elitist illusions concerning her family's social superiority when she realizes how completely present the wolf is at her door. After a turgid history of the righteous Pyncheons of Salem in chapter one, the second concerns itself only with an account of Hepzibah's fumbling attempts to open the shop on its first day of business. In the third chapter -- "The First Customer" -- Hepzibah encounters her first customer. By the close of the fourth, "A Day Behind The Counter," readers find themselves on the book's 56th page, almost one - fifth of the book, and still passing the time unproductively with Hepzibah in the shop on its opening day. Unfortunately, Hepzibah's protracted confrontation with reality is the strongest part of the book, Hepzibah being by far the most distinctive of the characters in its pages. But Hepzibah soon fades into the background, taking away with her what little drama exists; none follows.
In a later chapter, Hawthorne spends 6,352 words coyly conveying to the reader that an apparently sleeping man is not sleeping, but dead, something the reader has already guessed after completing the first of the many hammering paragraphs to follow. Winded passages like "You hear the ticking of his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber, doubtless! And yet he cannot be asleep. His eyes are open!" and "An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about, in a quest for what was once a world!" abound. Hawthorne was fond of exclamation points and short of self - discipline. It could be argued that Hawthorne was simply layering his prose with multiple crosshatches of irony, sarcasm, and satire, but, if so, Hawthorne, here already a king with no clothes, only doubly underscores his shortcomings as a prose stylist.
Readers of Hawthorne's third novel, the punishing The Blithedale Romance (1952), or his short stories 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux' and 'The May - Pole of Merrymount' know how willfully vague and turgid Hawthorne's work can be. His reputation today is probably some combination of accident of birth, proximity to high society, uncritical alliance to literary tradition, and the fact that his suffering prose style is interpreted by the pretentious or uneducated as evidence of highbrow genius. In truth, Hawthorne simply did not prove himself a very good writer in most of his work, regardless of the grandiosity of his themes or their genuine relevance to American history.
In an often reprinted essay, Hawthorne scholar Newton Arvin argued that Hawthorne's dominant theme was the 'prideful sin' of "cultivating the intellect at the expense of the sympathies," a phenomena which is generally understood to have been particularly commonplace in Puritan-rooted New England. However, Alvin, who clearly empathizes with Hawthorne on this point, fails to acknowledge that sympathy for others, whether sincere or unconsciously affected, can as readily become a source of 'sinful' pride as the intellect or any other human capacity. Hawthorne, whose best work is found in his simply written short works such as 'Feathertop: A Moralized Legend' and 'Young Goodman Brown,' in addition to his two books for children, A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, was an intelligent man of strong emotion, and it was there, in his dominant feeling function, that he understandably forged his creative work.
Those seriously pursuing a study of general Americana, American literature, or the history of New England should read the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps visit the lovely site of the actual house in Salem, Massachusetts. For everyone else except the masochistically curious, the novel is unessential reading.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not his greatest work...
Comment: The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne is considered one of his greatest novels, (According to Henry James) is based on a true story within Hawthorne's own family line. While the book may sound appealing, it is actually quite boorish with a poor climax, and a tiresome storyline.
The story starts out with a 30 page introduction about a Colonel who wants to expand his house, but his neighbor's property seems to be in the way. So he frames a plot against the man and calls him a witch, he gets hanged and the Colonel gets the poor framed man's land. However on the scaffold he places a curse on the Colonel and his future generations. The Colonel then gets the son of the man who cursed him to build his house. On the day that the house is finished the Colonel dies. Thus, we are taken to an old maid who has never worked in her life is now forced to set up a shop within the house. The drudgery continues from there.
Some interesting points within the book are how Hawthorne has a much different writing style in this book. He often makes comments to the reader criticizing his characters; most of these comments are quite comical. I did enjoy how he developed his characters even though it seemed he lost interest in some toward the end of the book.
Overall, the book had some up points and some down points, but overall it had many more down points than anything else. I wouldn't recommend this book unless you're a huge fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even then, I enjoyed The Scarlet Letter much better.
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Title: The House of the Seven Gables (Cliffs Notes) by Darlene Bennett Morris ISBN: 0822005956 Publisher: Cliffs Notes Pub. Date: August, 1988 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne ISBN: 0553210092 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 March, 1981 List Price(USD): $3.95 |
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Title: Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alfred Kazin ISBN: 0553212184 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 January, 1983 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville ISBN: 0553213113 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 February, 1981 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain ISBN: 0553211439 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: June, 1994 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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