Seven Gables Themes

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s esteemed works, The House of the Seven Gables is a Romance, a type of book differing from the traditional novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne says that by defining his writing as a Romance, he was free to use fabricated and fictional ways to narrate The House of the Seven Gables. So what exactly was the central theme of The House of the Seven Gables? There may have been themes, but in my opinion, there was only one central theme. Hawthorne explicitly uses the depth of the Puritans’ histories and his characters of the Romance to show that the sins of one generation visits the next generations.
As the story goes along, we are given to suspect that it was Colonel Pyncheon who framed Matthew Maule to be a wizard. In spiteful

vengeance, Matthew Maule shouts out in the moment of his last breathings on the scaffold that God will give Pyncheon blood to drink. It was a dark prophecy, an omen that the Colonel wasn’t even close to being flustered about. Ignoring the “shaking of the heads” from the villager and their gossips, the house that will endure generations of time is built and, ironically, by the dead wizard’s son himself. The Colonel will eventually die mysteriously with blood on his chin and beard in the very house that was built on the lands that he snatched away from Maule’s dead gripe.
The Colonel’s portrait looms ominously over the Pyncheons of this generation as the story plays out, and Hawthorne clearly compares the “honorable” Judge Pyncheon to Colonel Pyncheon throughout the book. To the gurgle in his throat, to his similar appearance to the Colonel, we can say that the Judge is a splitting image of the Colonel. The Judge will die an apoplectic death, similar to that of the Colonel with blood coating his shirt and beard. The sins the Judge had committed, but had disregarded, are afterwards revealed in the book and we are to know that the Judge, in a way, had killed his uncle but framed his own relation, Clifford, for the murder instead. The young Judge had been rifling through the papers of his uncle that determines the inheritances, destroying the ones that favored Clifford, when old Jaffrey Pyncheon walked in and had a fatal apoplexy. The Judge’s greed to get more land than what he already had, we can say, caused his own death, as did the Colonel’s greed compelled his own death.
Even centuries cannot make the blemish of the Colonel’s sins go away.

Although most of the novel takes place almost 200 years later, the Pyncheons still feel the effects of their ancestor’s crime. While Maule’s curse from the scaffold did set the Romance into action, the novel itself does not suggest that a curse alone could have battered the whole Pyncheon family. Instead, the Pyncheons’ anguish and gloom seems to have actually been brought upon mostly by their own greed and devouring ambition. Colonel Pyncheon brings the curse about to the family while trying to steal land, Gervayse Pyncheon’s life has a heartbreaking twist when he attempt to recover the missing land deed that resulted in the death of his beloved daughter, Alice, old Jaffrey Pyncheon expires when seeing his young nephew rummaging greedily through his papers, and the Judge himself dies an apoplectic death similar to that of the Colonel’s under similar conditions of wanting land.
History indeed does seem to repeat itself in The House of the Seven Gables, and the sins of one generation tended to visit the next generations. This theme could also be the “moral” of The House of the Seven Gables, and Nathaniel Hawthorne does, on lots of occasions, connect the sins of Colonel Pyncheon to the consecutive misfortunes of the Pyncheon family. With plenty of pages about sins and how they were getting passes on, I can indeed say that the sins of one generation impose on the next

generations.