Heart as a Cavern

The American Gothic is a romance that derives its characteristics from at the time, popular Gothic fiction from across the seas, inheriting traits such as the unfathomable, supernatural events of the haunted mansion. Descendants of the Pyncheons are affected by the ‘sudden and mysterious end’ (Hawthorne 11) of Colonel Pyncheon, that died with “marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a bloody hand on his plaited ruff.” (Hawthorne 20) Inexplainably, His descendants Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon and his son mimicked the same death generations later. An unique quality of its own is that while the English models focus on the aspect of horror, the American gothic places emphasis on the dark side of human nature, such as the concept of original sin in The House of Seven Gables. Growth, expansion and freedom were inspired from the American frontier, elements European gothic literature lacked. “There is a very American quality in this perpetual consciousness of a spell on Hawthorne's part; it is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life, that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one's morality. It is only an imaginative American that would feel urged to keep reverting to this circumstance, to keep analysing and cunningly considering it.” (Henry James 14) The conclusion explores the growth and renewal of mankind.
The House of Seven Gables centers around the concept of Original Sin. The whole story is base on the passing of sin from one generation of Pyncheons to the next. The aristocratic Pyncheon colonial received the House of Seven Gables by force from Maule, who was accused of necromancy and cried “G...

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...nalized since it’s not Maule’s curse that caused the death of the three Pyncheon men but that he knew Pyncheon family had a history of blood spewing health issue. With the origin of the curse coming to light, the rest of the Pyncheon family however are responsible for their own bad luck. The more passive members of the family seem to have happier endings than those driven by excessive ambition and greed. To a certain extent, the novel seems to be driven a lot by fate, but also suggests many times that fate is just an obstacle to be overcomed. Our destiny lays in our own hands and its unreasonable to be stuck with past sins of our ancestors.

Poe’s work probes deeply into the darkness of human nature and he habitually portrays aristocratic, hypersensitive madmen in gothic enclosures in his works such as Tell Tale Heart and The Raven. He praised Hawthorne’s work as,