EBOOK House of the Seven Gables

In the final years of the seventeenth century in a small New England town, the        venerable Colonel Pyncheon decides to erect a ponderously oak-framed and spacious        family mansion. It occupies the spot where Matthew Maule, `an obscure man', had        lived in a log hut, until his execution for witchcraft. From the scaffold, Maule        points his finger at the presiding Colonel and cries `God will give him blood to        drink!' The fate of Colonel Pyncheon exerts a heavy influence on his descendants        inthe crumbling mansion for the next century and a half.Hawthorne called his novel a        `Romance', drawing on the Gothic tradition which embraced and exploited the thrills        of the supernatural. Unlike The Scarlet Letter, with its unrelentingly dark view of        human nature and guilt, Hawthorne sought to write `a more natural and healthy        product of my mind', a story which would show guilt to be a trick of the        imagination. The tension between fantasy and a new realism underpins the novel's        descriptive virtuosity.