What is a Gable? (J/K I know.)

 

I just finished reading The House of Seven Gables.  I read it by accident when I was 12.  Someone told me I would like Anne of Green Gables, but by the time I got to the library I could only remember “Something about Gables.”  I don’t know how, maybe a chat with an elderly librarian, or maybe a shuffle through a card catalog (with actual cards), but somehow I went home with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 classic ‘romance.’ I could not figure out why anyone would recommend such a dreary book to a pre-teen.  What about 12-year-old-me had made them think I would like a 150+-year-old book about a grumpy old maid and her crazy brother?  Well- come to find out many years later about Anne of Green Gables- far more suitable to a 12-year-old girl.

Fun fact: Nathaniel Hawthorne added the ‘e’ to his name to try to disassociate himself from ancestor-Judge John Hawthorn of the Salem Witch trials.  Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and h his cousin lived in the Turner-Ingersol mansion, aka The House of Seven Gables.  When Hawthorne visited the house it has been reduced to only had 3 or 4 gables, but since his time the perfect number of gables have been restored to make it a financial success as a historic house.

About 3 years ago we went to Salam for a visit.  To be honest, I didn’t know The House of Seven Gables was a real house, nor that it was located in Salam until we showed up there.  It was like this:

Me: Oh! The House of Seven Gables is here.  We should go.

D: Why?

Me: It’s famous!  Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a book about it.  I read it by accident.

D: How do you read a book by accident?

Me: It’s complicated.

D: Was it a good book?

Me: No, it was terrible.  I hated it, and I don’t remember anything about it.  We still need to go.

D: Okay …

We took a tour through the House of Seven Gables.  I could barely fit my giant pregnant belly through the secret passage. I spent the WHOLE tour saying, “Lailah, stop that!” “Lailah! don’t touch that!”  “Lailah, come back here!” “Lailah! Where are you?” “Lailah, put that down!”  At the end of the tour, Eowyn asked our tour guide when her baby was coming.  The obviously NOT pregnant guide looked mortified before I rushed to tell her my children thought this was her house and she had shown us a nursery, so they thought she was going to have a baby.  As everyone shuffled past us on the way out each person in our tour group said, “Bye, Lailah. “  “It was nice to meet you, Lailah.”  “Keep having fun, Lailah.”

I would like to go back to the House of Seven Gables, alone.

After reading The House of Seven Gables for a second time I find it to still be very dreary- but not as terrible as I thought.  Hawthorne labeled it as a ‘romance.’  I wonder if romance meant something different in 1851 than it means today. I’m not going to say it was 100% romance-free, but I can confidently say it is about 98.7% romance-free. 

I read it with a highlighter in hand. I marked all the words which I did not know the definition for.  I’ve taught plenty of reading classes, so I could guess a general meaning, but I found it interesting how many words I would have to look up to really know the meaning.

"She has opened the secret drawer of an escritoire."

"Some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework"

"Then, also, the augury of ill-success, uttered from the sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her half-dead hope like a clod into a grave."

"For her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at the sight of the copper coin."

"But recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any other terms,"

"Which would ensure obeisance to her sterling gentility"

Those are some words before I reached page 50. 

There are also lots of interesting quotes.  Here are a few  many which I marked:

“But her heart never frowned.”  💗

“Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and well-provisioned breakfast table.”

“Yet there were not tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a free and determined gait.  It was the spirit of the man that could not walk.”

“It is often instructive to take the woman’s, the private and domestic, view of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the pencil sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the originals back.”

“But the worst of all-the hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to endure, and perhaps for Clifford too-was his invincible distaste for her appearance.” ☹

“There seemed no necessity for his having drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he has breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air.”

“The sick in mind, and perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition.”

“I’m one of those people who think that infinity is big enough for us all -and eternity long enough.”

“Doubtless, more than one New Englander- or, let him be of what country he might, it is as likely to be the case- passed by, and threw a look at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral condition was here exemplified.”

“She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one’s native tongue.”

“Since those days, no doubt, it has grown to be suspected that, in consequence of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the proceedings against the witches had proved for less acceptable to the Beneficent Father than to the very Arch Enemy whom they were intended to distress and utterly overwhelm.”

“I wish you would speak more plainly,” cried Phoebi, perplexed and displeased; and above all, that you  would feel more like a Christian and a human being!”

“In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was to be alone.”

“But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a love beam of God’s care and pity for every separate need.”

“… so heavy and lumpish that we can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which has perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!”

“He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots.”

“The past is but a course and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.”

“Transition being so facile, what can by any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot?”

“Morbid influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of households.”

“She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone.” 

“If you were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons on my waistcoat!”