The House of the Seven Gables

Colonel Pyncheon has the carpenter Matthew Maule hanged as a witch in order to seize Maule's land and build the seven-gabled house on it, and Maule's dying curse, that God will give the Pyncheons blood to drink, recurs across two centuries as a family pattern of sudden, throat-related deaths, starting with the Colonel himself, found dead in his chair the day the house is finished. Hawthorne, whose own ancestor sat as a judge at the Salem trials, builds the novel as a study in inherited guilt: a fortune built on an unpunished crime keeps generating its own low-grade poison in every generation that lives off it without ever answering for how it was acquired.

In the novel's present, Hepzibah Pyncheon, poor and glowering, opens a cent-shop in the house's front room out of sheer necessity; her brother Clifford returns broken after decades in prison for a murder he didn't commit, framed by their cousin Judge Pyncheon, who has inherited both the family fortune and the Colonel's rapacity intact; and Phoebe, a sunny country cousin, arrives and begins undoing the house's gloom by force of temperament alone. Holgrave, a bohemian daguerreotypist boarding upstairs, is secretly the last of the Maules, drawn to Phoebe in a courtship that quietly proposes to settle, two hundred years late, the debt the Colonel never paid.

Holgrave's camera, a genuinely novel technology in the 1840s, becomes the book's modern counterpart to the Maules' rumored hypnotic power over Pyncheon women across the generations: his portraits are said to catch a sitter's true, unguarded character rather than the practiced expression a subject offers on purpose, and he uses one such image, taken of the dead Judge Pyncheon, to expose exactly the same rapacious look the Colonel wears in his own ancestral portrait. Hawthorne treats the two men's hidden faces as literally the same face, inherited whole across two hundred years of respectable disguise.