Hawthorne & the Salem Witch Trials

I have always enjoyed reading Hawthorne’s works. “The Birth-Mark” and The Scarlet Letter are, to this point in my life, my Hawthorne must-reads. Maybe it’s my cynical nature (after all, I do enjoy Poe as well). Maybe it’s the gothic romance—the wonderment of how a person could have such a dismal outlook on life (have you read The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe?). After one class period and two chapters, The House of Seven Gables is chalking up to be another gothic romance I’m going to enjoy cover-to-cover.

I have to admit, paragraph one of Hawthorne’s classic confused and upset me. I read and reread the paragraph three or four times and finally huffed in frustration—way too many clauses and descriptors! I lost the subject of the first sentence (which, at 36 words is a little long for an introductory sentence).

After fighting through the first sentence, Hawthorne grabbed my attention. I felt as if he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the book—I was no longer a reader, but visiting the little New England town, walking alongside him as he described the House of Seven Gables on Pyncheon Street.

Hawthorne starts The House of Seven Gables with mystery, deception, and an old fashioned witch trial—what better tools are there to grab a reader’s attention?

In the first chapter, Hawthorne retells the history of the Pyncheon estate known as the House of Seven Gables. I found some of his descriptions intriguing as they tied the house, not only to New England’s past, but also to his own as well. The addition of Matthew Maule, the original owner of the property of the regal house, as a witch raises interest and questions. Was Maule a witch? Did Colonel Pyncheon justly receive the land he had so long fought for?

As I read the interaction between Maule and Colonel Pyncheon, I recalled my participation in The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Though fiction, Miller used historical characters to tell a horrific story of the Salem Witch Trials in colonial Massachusetts Bay. Abigail Williams and several young ladies of the town were involved in witchcraft and struggled to hide their worship from the religious town. Driven to desperation, the girls begin accusing innocent persons of witchcraft leading to the death of many upstanding citizens. The correlation between Colonel Pyncheon and Abigail Williams captured me. Wasn’t Pyncheon just as guilty as Williams? Didn’t they both use their reputation and propriety to accuse and condemn the innocent just to get what they wanted? Creepy . . . yet intriguing.

Hawthorne’s own past was connected to the Salem witch trials. His great-grandfather, Judge Hathorne, was responsible for sentencing a number of persons to death during the Salem Witch Trials. History tells us that Hawthorne was ashamed of his heritage—he even changed the spelling of his name (he added a ‘w’) to separate himself from his haunting past. Yet the inclusion of Salem, Puritanism, and the witch trials make me wonder if he carried a heavy load of guilt from Judge Hathorne’s actions.

Hathorne also connects himself to the work through the description of the Pyncheon family. If he truly carried familial guilt, as I suppose he does, it would go to reason that the Hathornes, like the Pyncheons, were filled with family pride and bound to the duty of tradition. Why did Hawthorne change his name? To break the ties to duty—if he wasn’t a Hathorne, he wasn’t bound to the family . . . right?

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