![]() ![]() And after all these years, the deed to a vast tract of land, that would settle great wealth on the family, is still missing. Cousin Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon is making himself odious by threatening to have Clifford committed to an institution. Her brother Clifford has just been released from prison after serving a thirty-year sentence for murder, and his mind struggles to maintain any kind of hold on reality. Hepzibah, an old maid and resident of the house, is forced by advanced poverty to open a shop in a part of the house. ![]() ![]() Now, almost two centuries later, the family is in real distress. ![]() An ancestor took advantage of the Salem witch trials to wrest away the land whereon the house would be raised… but the land’s owner, about to be executed as a wizard, cursed the Pyncheon family until such time as they should make restitution. The full weight of the gloomy mansion of the title seems to sit on the fortunes of the Pyncheon family. “The wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones and… becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” Hawthorne’s moral for “The House of the Seven Gables,” taken from the Preface, accurately presages his story. ![]()
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