The House of the Seven Gables is a novel about staying. The curse, the house, the Pyncheon family’s two centuries of decline — all of it is finally a study in why people keep living inside a story that was written by somebody else.

Nobody in the present-day action committed the original wrong. Colonel Pyncheon, who had Matthew Maule executed to take his land and built his house on the site of that execution, is long dead before the novel begins. Hepzibah is not guilty. Clifford — who spent thirty years in prison for a crime he did not commit — is not guilty. They are paying for something they had no part in, in a house they cannot quite bring themselves to leave.

Hawthorne never describes the house neutrally. Every time it appears, the description is doing moral work — the gables press, the Colonel’s portrait watches, the garden at the back is a different world from the front facade that faces the street. The house doesn’t illustrate the theme. It performs it. He barely ever needs to state what he’s saying, because the architecture is saying it in every paragraph, without being asked.

The novel ends with a young couple walking out of the house into the light. The curse lifts. The inherited wrong is acknowledged and then set down. The ending does not defeat the curse. It abandons it. That distinction turns out to matter quite a lot.

Down here, that particular ending takes longer to read than it used to.

— G. H. Schreiber 

10/06/2026