The Nature of Light

Hawthorne packs The House of Seven Gables full of literary symbols and themes. At first, the number of themes overwhelmed me—how was I going to be able to follow the links of all these themes?

I’m not.

At least not in this reading (it is, after all, only the first time I have read The House of Seven Gables. I’ll leave some themes to be further followed and developed for another reading.). I have no doubt I’ll read about Hawthorne’s house cover-to-cover a few more times in the next few years.

The themes I have been captured by and am choosing to follow are captured and personified in one character: Phoebe Pyncheon. Phoebe is the young cousin of our aging Miss Hepzibah—and truly, Hawthorne describes her in direct opposition to the old woman. Phoebe is young and beautiful, careless of the weight of aristocracy (she grew up on a farm, away from the decaying house), and domestic. But there’s more.

LIGHT

Hawthorne describes Hepzibah as a shadow, wandering the dark hallways of the family house like the ghosts of the generations before. The author even says that “neither sunshine nor household fire” could be found in the old woman or the house (55).

The outlook of the story looks bleak until Hawthorne introduces Phoebe. If Hepzibah is a shadow, Phoebe is a beam of light. From the moment she enters the story, Phoebe shines into Hepzibah’s bland world and brightens the future of the Pyncheon family. The first paragraph of chapter five is filled with light references describing Phoebe—she has a bloom on her cheeks and is called a dewy maiden (like the Dawn itself).

As the story progresses, Hawthorne continually refers to Phoebe as light. When the young girl meets Clifford, who seems to live in more darkness than Hepzibah, Phoebe’s light pierces his shroud of darkness. Her presence and voice bring light to his troubled world. The old man refers to her as light captured within a dew drop on a rose petal.

Phoebe is the light of The House of Seven Gables. Though I have not completed the story yet, I’m sure the fate of the Pyncheons lies within Phoebe.

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