Progress and Providence in The House of the Seven Gables
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3526536 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Gatta (0000-0002-7639-0311, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1978 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 37 |
| Publication date | 1978-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2925520 |
| OpenAlex | W2321066714 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
T HE PROSPEROUS CONCLUSION of The House of the Seven Gables would seem to suggest that there is nothing so permanently forbidding about an ancestral curse, or even perhaps about that more ancient human curse of Original Sin, that the combined benefits of money, marriage, and a new house in the country cannot solve. True, it is possible to read Hawthorne's ending ironically-or to recognize, at least, that the monetary fortune bestowed so abruptly on the former tenants of the rusty old house may be an inevitable source of future misfortune. But there can be little doubt that the essential shape of this book is progressive and optimistic. Not only does the marital union between Pyncheon and Maule end a cycle of persecution and retribution that has prolonged itself through a century and a half of New England history, but the spiritual forces of good-in particular, the frankness and rejuvenating sunshine of Phoebe-score in the end a clear if less than total triumph over the forces of evil, represented in the villainy and false smiles of Jaffrey Pyncheon. Still, it is not easy to say exactly what sort of progress this movement is supposed to imply. What larger prospects for social and historical amelioration might Hawthorne want us to see in the communal regeneration that finally takes place in Salem in I850, issuing forth symbolically from Maule's Well in the Pyncheon garden? Should we translate the fortunate progression of the story's plot into a statement about the progress of Jeffersonian democracy in America? Or is Hawthorne tracing instead a moral and material progress dictated by the rational secular temper of the Enlightenment, or the social progress of humanity in proto-Darwinian evolutionary terms? Each of these readings has had its proponents;' but
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |