Reading Response: Hawthorne (The House of Seven Gables)

Colin Leath
Professor Borgstrom
English 522
4 October 2005

Reading Response: Hawthorne (The House of Seven Gables)

The easterly storm that begins chapter 15 (“The Scowl and Smile”) and extends through chapter 18 is a symbol which interacts with other symbols. A storm may be an occasion for joy; this storm, however, occurs in a context in which it suggests the following meanings: change, climax, destruction, purification, cruel fate, and the machinations of the author. The symbols the storm interacts with include: the kitchen fireplace, the garden, the moss and weeds, the furniture, the portrait of the Colonel, the whole house itself, Hepzibah, and the smile of Judge Pyncheon.

The storm means change. It occurs in the summer, just after sunny Phoebe has left, signifying a decline in the fortune of the characters. The storm also suggests the plot climax is at hand because the storm is so extraordinary: it breaks a long summer drought; it is not a brief, cooling thunderstorm that provides relief from sultry weather; it is chilling; it sets in for five days.

The storm symbolizes destruction and purification, echoing the flood of Genesis. The goodness grown in previous chapters washes away. For example, “The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping foliage of its summerhouse, was an image to be shuddered at.” The storm also cooccurs with “an event sufficient in itself to poison, for Hepzibah and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought the hummingbirds along with it.” Along with good goes bad: what we find needing purification is “the decaying corpse . . . that pool of stagnant water, foul with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with blood,” that represents the souls of men like Judge and Colonel Pyncheon. After the last day of the storm, a “wide benediction of the sky” dawns on a different House of Seven Gables, “its windows gleam[ing] cheerfully in the slanting sunlight.”

Finally, because the author, partly by means of his preface, partly through the loquaciousness of his narrator, makes his control of the fantastic nature of the romance an important element of his novel (e.g., “[The writer] may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.”), the storm is both a symbol of the cruelty of fate and a sign of the author's sadism. Many of the preceding 73,500 words elaborate or repeat how miserable, pitiful, and already dead Clifford and Hepzibah are. The reader has intuited for some 68,000 words that life will yet get worse for them. By means of the storm, Hepzibah and Clifford are prodded a few more times before the novel's close.

Of the symbols the storm interacts with, the sultry smile of Judge Pyncheon is one of the most significant. The storm parallels Hepzibah's scowl: “Hepzibah . . . seemed not merely possessed with the east wind, but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and sullen spell of weather,” and oversees the overcoming of the instrumental good feeling emanated by the Judge and the uncovering of his core.

The storm is both an effective symbol in its own right and a means by which the significance of other symbols in the text is broadened and developed. It is among the most memorable uses of symbol in the text.