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bloodygranuaileSo, like pretty much everybody else in the US, I had to read Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in high school, so that I could be a properly educated person who gets Scarlet Letter references, which is an imporant life skill in this country, particularly if you want to feel smart by reading pretentious mainstream journalism. (I am home this weekend, which means I am reading actual newspapers.) Anyway, we read The Scarlet Letter. I don't remember much about it, except that I didn't hate it. I actually liked it, except for the classroom discussion bit, because classroom discussion in high schooll is always weird (it's because you can't say bad things about the Works of Great Literature because then you Don't Appreciate Great Literature and the teacher is disappointed in you. Drove me batty; college was so much better). Everyone else hated it. And I was like, screw them, it's not that difficult to read, I am going to go to the used bookstore and buy more Nathaniel Hawthorne books.
Six years later, I actually arsed myself to read the copy of The House of the Seven Gables that I got from the used bookstore, and while I did rather enjoy reading it, I am finding myself much more empathetic to the Hawthorne-hating crowd. This is a short novel for the 1850s, clocking in at 284 pages, and the writing is so dense and flowery and full of random tangents that the amount of story contained in this 284 pages makes Moby Dick look like it is full of complicated plot twists. The blurb on the back cover gives not just the premise of the story, but actually gives the ending away, although that might just be bad copywriting as much as it is an attempt to fill up the whole back cover.
The story of the House of the Seven Gables is as such: During the Puritan witch-hunting craze, a dude named Colonel Pyncheon had his next-door neighbor Matthew Maule implicated for witchcraft, so that he could take over his land. Maule publicly cursed Pyncheon before he was executed, saying that "God will give him blood to drink." Pyncheon builds the House of the Seven Gables on Pyncheon's land. He later dies of some sort of coronary issue that causes him to suddenly spit up blood and stop living. The neighbors are wigged out. Pyncheon's descendants continue to live in the house and be dire Puritans and some of them die in mysterious ways, all the way up until the mid-nineteenth century. The master of the house, Clifford, is in jail for a murder that he may or may not have committed. The next in line for the house, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, lives somewhere else in town and was instrumental in getting Clifford convicted, and also is a douche. Clifford's sister, Hepzibah, lives in the house, and is a sad old maid who is so broke she opens up a cent shop (she is bad at it). A daguerreotypist lives in the attic; he is actually a descendent of Matthew Maule, and he hangs out with political reformers and is basically the 1850s version of a hippie. Another Pyncheon cousin, Phoebe, comes to live at the house; she is young and from the country, and therefore embodies every romanticized notion of young people and the country and magical nourishing femininity that the nineteenth century has seen fit to plague us with. Phoebe is simple, and fresh, and innocent, and unspoilt, and cheerful, and full of some sort of Essence of Angel-in-the-house-itude, just to be extra ideal and impossible. If any young Victorian ladies were too look to Phoebe as a role model to emulate perfect Victorian womanhood, they'd be shit outta luck, because only a marginal amount of Phoebe's model womanhood can be in any way traced back to stuff she actually says or does. Other women can only try and make a room homey and domestic by cleaning and interior decorating and shit; Phoebe en-homey-fies a room just by walking into it. She kind of makes me gag, and I am extremely good at turning a room into a living-space.
That is the premise. Here is the plot: Clifford gets out of jail. Judge Pyncheon wants to get him declared insane so he can take the house, but conveniently dies of sudden coronary blood-spitting. (It's hereditary.) The daguerreotypist marries Phoebe and the curse is lifted. Also, they find some papers granting the Pyncheons huge... tracts of land... that they'd been looking for for years but which the Maules had hidden from them due to the family's douchitude.
Yeah, that's it.
Hawthorne spins this out for an entire book largely by using a particular point of view that I don't think we even learned what it's called in any of my creative writing classes because you're not allowed to use it anymore. I call it "Author And Reader Have Invisibility Cloaks And Are Creepers." This is where the text says things like "But let us now go into the other room, very quietly so that we don't wake [character] up, and see the view from his/her window! It is early in the morning, and the sun is starting to peep up over the trees that we can see from [character's] window because you, the reader, and I, the author, are standing in his/her room like invisible little Edward Cullens! But now it is time for [character] to wake up, as the morning sunlight is stealing softly across his/her pillow. We will wait for him/her to react to the sunlight, and not leave, because we are not actually Edward Cullens. But look! He/She does not stir! [Character]? [Character]? Are you awake? Do you not feel the warm sunlight on your face, does its butterly light not enlighten the color under your eyelids from black to that funky pinkish-red color? Dear reader, [character] is still sleeping, maybe we should poke him/her with a stick...." and then this goes on for four pages until Humble Author and Dear Reader finish their investigation and conclude that the character is dead. At one point, Hawthorne does this for an entire twenty-four-hour cycle of a dead dude sitting in a chair being dead.
In other hallmarks of nineteenth-century writing that I'm glad we are not allowed to use anymore, the casual racism employed when talking about one of the old Pyncheons' butler is viscerally terrible. Nothing particularly gothic happens to the butler, he pretty much just buttles, it's just that every single word he says or that other people say to him or that is used to describe his thoughts, actions, or appearance are so blatantly racist that my teeth hurt. Other characters address him as "darky" and there are bad puns about "looking black" at people. The only redeeming quality about the portrayal of Scipio is that he only shows up in two scenes so we don't have to read very much of this.
Despite the things in this novel that have Not Aged Well, I overall rather enjoyed it, because I like overblown gothic family dramas, particularly ones that involve treasure-hunting and Big Family Secrets. (And I do think the "Author And Reader Are Creepers" POV is unintentionally amusing.) I also learned a new way to spell Jeff--I think at this point I should keep a list of Ways To Spell Jeff--in this case, the form is "Jaffrey." There are also a lot of funny ranting and raving scenes by various slightly batty and verbose Puritans, which makes any book worth it.
Six years later, I actually arsed myself to read the copy of The House of the Seven Gables that I got from the used bookstore, and while I did rather enjoy reading it, I am finding myself much more empathetic to the Hawthorne-hating crowd. This is a short novel for the 1850s, clocking in at 284 pages, and the writing is so dense and flowery and full of random tangents that the amount of story contained in this 284 pages makes Moby Dick look like it is full of complicated plot twists. The blurb on the back cover gives not just the premise of the story, but actually gives the ending away, although that might just be bad copywriting as much as it is an attempt to fill up the whole back cover.
The story of the House of the Seven Gables is as such: During the Puritan witch-hunting craze, a dude named Colonel Pyncheon had his next-door neighbor Matthew Maule implicated for witchcraft, so that he could take over his land. Maule publicly cursed Pyncheon before he was executed, saying that "God will give him blood to drink." Pyncheon builds the House of the Seven Gables on Pyncheon's land. He later dies of some sort of coronary issue that causes him to suddenly spit up blood and stop living. The neighbors are wigged out. Pyncheon's descendants continue to live in the house and be dire Puritans and some of them die in mysterious ways, all the way up until the mid-nineteenth century. The master of the house, Clifford, is in jail for a murder that he may or may not have committed. The next in line for the house, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, lives somewhere else in town and was instrumental in getting Clifford convicted, and also is a douche. Clifford's sister, Hepzibah, lives in the house, and is a sad old maid who is so broke she opens up a cent shop (she is bad at it). A daguerreotypist lives in the attic; he is actually a descendent of Matthew Maule, and he hangs out with political reformers and is basically the 1850s version of a hippie. Another Pyncheon cousin, Phoebe, comes to live at the house; she is young and from the country, and therefore embodies every romanticized notion of young people and the country and magical nourishing femininity that the nineteenth century has seen fit to plague us with. Phoebe is simple, and fresh, and innocent, and unspoilt, and cheerful, and full of some sort of Essence of Angel-in-the-house-itude, just to be extra ideal and impossible. If any young Victorian ladies were too look to Phoebe as a role model to emulate perfect Victorian womanhood, they'd be shit outta luck, because only a marginal amount of Phoebe's model womanhood can be in any way traced back to stuff she actually says or does. Other women can only try and make a room homey and domestic by cleaning and interior decorating and shit; Phoebe en-homey-fies a room just by walking into it. She kind of makes me gag, and I am extremely good at turning a room into a living-space.
That is the premise. Here is the plot: Clifford gets out of jail. Judge Pyncheon wants to get him declared insane so he can take the house, but conveniently dies of sudden coronary blood-spitting. (It's hereditary.) The daguerreotypist marries Phoebe and the curse is lifted. Also, they find some papers granting the Pyncheons huge... tracts of land... that they'd been looking for for years but which the Maules had hidden from them due to the family's douchitude.
Yeah, that's it.
Hawthorne spins this out for an entire book largely by using a particular point of view that I don't think we even learned what it's called in any of my creative writing classes because you're not allowed to use it anymore. I call it "Author And Reader Have Invisibility Cloaks And Are Creepers." This is where the text says things like "But let us now go into the other room, very quietly so that we don't wake [character] up, and see the view from his/her window! It is early in the morning, and the sun is starting to peep up over the trees that we can see from [character's] window because you, the reader, and I, the author, are standing in his/her room like invisible little Edward Cullens! But now it is time for [character] to wake up, as the morning sunlight is stealing softly across his/her pillow. We will wait for him/her to react to the sunlight, and not leave, because we are not actually Edward Cullens. But look! He/She does not stir! [Character]? [Character]? Are you awake? Do you not feel the warm sunlight on your face, does its butterly light not enlighten the color under your eyelids from black to that funky pinkish-red color? Dear reader, [character] is still sleeping, maybe we should poke him/her with a stick...." and then this goes on for four pages until Humble Author and Dear Reader finish their investigation and conclude that the character is dead. At one point, Hawthorne does this for an entire twenty-four-hour cycle of a dead dude sitting in a chair being dead.
In other hallmarks of nineteenth-century writing that I'm glad we are not allowed to use anymore, the casual racism employed when talking about one of the old Pyncheons' butler is viscerally terrible. Nothing particularly gothic happens to the butler, he pretty much just buttles, it's just that every single word he says or that other people say to him or that is used to describe his thoughts, actions, or appearance are so blatantly racist that my teeth hurt. Other characters address him as "darky" and there are bad puns about "looking black" at people. The only redeeming quality about the portrayal of Scipio is that he only shows up in two scenes so we don't have to read very much of this.
Despite the things in this novel that have Not Aged Well, I overall rather enjoyed it, because I like overblown gothic family dramas, particularly ones that involve treasure-hunting and Big Family Secrets. (And I do think the "Author And Reader Are Creepers" POV is unintentionally amusing.) I also learned a new way to spell Jeff--I think at this point I should keep a list of Ways To Spell Jeff--in this case, the form is "Jaffrey." There are also a lot of funny ranting and raving scenes by various slightly batty and verbose Puritans, which makes any book worth it.
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Date: 2011-08-27 04:34 pm (UTC)