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The Pyncheon House In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House Of The Seven Gables

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Not everything is as it seems in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables.” The darkness of the old Pyncheon house is impressive and significant. Hawthorne describes the house as symbolic of the Pyncheon family that resides within, with its “shadowy and thoughtful gloom,” and its “scattered shavings, chips and shingles.” The evil spirit that haunts the house is fixed in the portrait of its founder, Colonel Pyncheon, the man who accused Matthew Maule of witchcraft to seize his property. The old portrait is the demon of guilt that haunts the Pyncheon house. Its resemblance to Judge Pyncheon, the villain of this novel, shows the present’s correlation with the past, as the Judge emulates the criminal greed of his ancestry but also in

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