Decaying Aristocracy

“The truth is, that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors” (Hawthorne 155) explains Holgrave about the aristocratic roots of the Pyncheon family in The House of the Seven Gables. In this novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a story that effectively describes the clash between the decaying aristocracy and the emerging laboring class in the nineteenth-century in America through its characters. This “gothic romance” tells the story of an aristocratic Pyncheon family that once was wealthy, but now encounters itself with poverty and scarcity to the point that the old maid, Hepzibah Pyncheon, must open up a cent-shop in the house in order to survive. Through out the novel, Hawthorne uses Hepzibah to show the reader the inevitable process of transformation from the high aristocracy to the lower middle class that every aristocrat had to go trough in those times.

In properly understanding the full meaning of the novel, the readers must first [Democracy in America]

Moreover, the readers must reach the conclusion that each character represents a class structure from the America of those times: “They are all figures rather than characters—they are all pictures rather than persons… They are all types, to the author's mind, of something general, of something that is bound up with the history, at large, of families and individuals…” (James). As the story goes on, Hawthorne makes the readers see time and time again how this is totally true, and it all starts in the central event of the novel when Hepzibah has to open up the shop, which represents her transition into the middle class.

“The aristocracy’s power is founded in the past. If a pers...

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...e against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind: a sentiment of virulence… towards the idle aristocracy to which it had so recently been her pride to belong” (Hawthorne 51.) This different attitude towards the people that visited the shop is the first step in Hepzibah’s transition and provides the starting point in her induction of the middle class.

Works Cited

Hart, Emma. “Work, family and the Eighteenth-Century History of a Middle Class in the American South.” Journal of Southern History. 78.3 (2012): 551-578. Web.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables, Pennsylvania: Jim Manis, 2014.Web.

James, Henry, Jr. "Hawthorne." Hawthorne. Henry James. Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1879. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 29 Mar. 2014.