Ghosts, witches, and family curses aren’t subjects normally found in nineteenth-century romances. And yet, all are present in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s eerie second novel, The House of the Seven Gables. In it, Hawthorne introduces the Pyncheons, a self-righteous, greedy, and slothful people whose destructive hereditary traits arouse the revenge of the humble Maules. In turn, the Pyncheons blame the Maules’ revenge—and, particularly, the ancient curse of accused wizard Matthew Maule—for each misfortune in their life. But it was really their overbearing greed which caused the Pyncheons poverty, depression, and death—not the Maule curse, which was another result of these traits.
Though Colonel Pyncheon, the earliest mentioned member of the Pyncheon family, established a wealth that should have left “future …show more content…
Colonel Pyncheon’s deceptively minor role in the execution of Matthew Maule is implied by Hawthorne to have been motivated by the Colonel’s greed for Maule’s land, admitting “a doubt that whether the stalwart Puritan [Pyncheon] had acted as a man of conscience” (12). The heavy guilt undoubtedly caused by the Colonel’s greedy misdeed caused a fatal apoplectic episode, leaving him a victim of his own hardhearted greed. Similarly, Judge Pyncheon’s guilty also carried him to the grave. In his youth, he began his greedy pursuit of his cousin Clifford’s entrusted future wealth—escalating into Clifford’s false imprisonment for the death of their uncle. The Judge buried this deliberate injustice under his pride-fueled high self-image and false affability, but in his old age, the Judge once again pursued his cousin’s unproven wealth. However, after his seeming success, he also dies an unanticipated apoplectic death—caused by the “evil and unsightly…daily guilt” (Hawthorne, 201) which he had fought off for so
Though Colonel Pyncheon, the earliest mentioned member of the Pyncheon family, established a wealth that should have left “future …show more content…
Colonel Pyncheon’s deceptively minor role in the execution of Matthew Maule is implied by Hawthorne to have been motivated by the Colonel’s greed for Maule’s land, admitting “a doubt that whether the stalwart Puritan [Pyncheon] had acted as a man of conscience” (12). The heavy guilt undoubtedly caused by the Colonel’s greedy misdeed caused a fatal apoplectic episode, leaving him a victim of his own hardhearted greed. Similarly, Judge Pyncheon’s guilty also carried him to the grave. In his youth, he began his greedy pursuit of his cousin Clifford’s entrusted future wealth—escalating into Clifford’s false imprisonment for the death of their uncle. The Judge buried this deliberate injustice under his pride-fueled high self-image and false affability, but in his old age, the Judge once again pursued his cousin’s unproven wealth. However, after his seeming success, he also dies an unanticipated apoplectic death—caused by the “evil and unsightly…daily guilt” (Hawthorne, 201) which he had fought off for so