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!”
