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In what might be seen as a similar light, Michael D. Bell claims that, in Seven Gables, Hawthorne faces the contradictions between the cyclical and linear views of history (213). Even though Hawthorne emphasizes the approach to history as a cycle, he also seems to accept that historical change is possible. He contrasts the concept of existential guilt to the hope for a new beginning. At the core of his romance is the conflict between history and determinism. As Holgrave says, “it will startle you to see what slaves we are slaves to by-gone times—to Death, if we give the matter the right word!” (Gables: 183). The question is whether man can escape the guilt his ancestors have incurred. Thus the novel oscillates between the power of a static determination and the possibility of dynamic progress. Klaus P. Hansen sees in the figure on the top of the barrel-organ the most suggestive depiction of an inexorable fate. This microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm, revealing that the ultimate consequence of determinism is utter senselessness (97).

Despite the static nature of many parts of Seven Gables, we cannot say that there is no progress: “If we conceive of the circles of history in terms of the ancient figure of the wheel of fate, then the death of the judge and much else in the history of the family would make it appear that the wheel is merely going around. But the union of Pyncheon and Maule suggests that the wheel is moving somewhere as it revolves”

(Waggoner 1967: 406). Holgrave’s and Phoebe’s marriage seems to break at least partially the circular movement of the story and makes us believe that history is moving

99 Morrison points out that “Beloved has no place there now. Sethe is now going to concentrate on taking care of herself, the beloved that is inside her which is her. ‘She’ is the beloved, not the child” (Carabí 1993: 110).

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ahead. However, we cannot be completely certain whether history provides reasons for hope or whether, as Hawthorne suggests, great mistakes can never be corrected or erased. In fact, we know that for some characters, such as Clifford and Hepzibah, who have suffered much, “the past can never be entirely obliterated” (Cunliffe 1964: 99).

There are elements in this romance that support the idea of determinism and some others which emphasize progress and hope: “there are tokens of change as well as tokens of repetition in Seven Gables (Michael Bell: 216). Among the aspects of the tale which highlight hopefulness and advancement, I will mention the moment when Holgrave hypnotizes Phoebe, as his ancestor did before with the haughty Alice Pyncheon, and does not take advantage of his power. Besides, his marriage with Phoebe is also contrasted with the abortive relationship between their ancestors one hundred years before. In addition, Hyatt Waggoner claims that “the common impression that the work [Seven Gables] simply wavers between belief in progress and despair of any escape from the past may be corrected by a closer look at the implications of the emphatic Eden imagery [. . .]” (1967: 407). Many critics have supported the idea that Hawthorne’s romance evinces significant hopeful signs, “The plot of The House of the Seven Gables is dominated by conventional devices and figures associated with historical progress” (Michael Bell: 217).¹⁰⁰

There is a clear recognition of the fact that economic-historical progress is achieved through democratic advances and the decline of aristocracy. John Gatta believes that social advancement is gradual and brought about by Providence. Human efforts are powerless in themselves, they can just assist provisionally in the subtler larger design of Providence: “man’s best-directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities” (Gables: 180). He argues that the belief in the benevolent and mysterious designs of a hidden God, “was one of the few points of Christian theology to which Hawthorne himself gave fairly explicit creedal assent”

(39).¹⁰¹ Thus personal development is wholly dependent on God’s enigmatic schemes and Hawthorne’s story illustrates His inscrutable ways (39). The opening of the cent-shop, which has beneficial effects for Hepzibah, or Judge Pyncheon’s death, which

100 Frank Battaglia believes that Hawthorne fully agrees that human history is brightening (590): “As to the main point—may we never live to doubt it!—as to the better centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right” (Gables: 180).

101 For more information, see: Hubert Hoeltje (1962). Inward Sky: The Mind and the Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press: 460-461; supplemented by Leonard J. Fick (1955).

The Light Beyond. Westminster, Md.: Newman Press; and Hyatt Waggoner (1963: esp. 13-18- 28-29, and 248). Many critics, including Hoeltje, Randall Stewart, W. Stacy Johnson—and, more recently, Joseph Schwartz and Raymond Benoit—have tended to place Hawthorne in or near “the central catholic tradition of Christian humanism” (Waggoner’s phrase). Dissenters from this view find in Hawthorne’s fiction a skeptic and secularist perspective more than a Christian approach: Nina Baym (1976: esp. 9, 68-69, and 117-118).

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establishes Clifford’s innocence and prepares the path for redemption, seem to be providentially fortunate (40-41).¹⁰²

In the nineteenth century, there were different attempts to create an ideal society, such as the experiment of Brook Farm, and the communitarian reformers of Hawthorne’s days—including his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody—were “proclaiming the imminent realization of the kingdom of God on earth.”¹⁰³ According to Gatta, the final apocalyptic imagery that overwhelms the end of the story has been seen as the underground of sacred history advancing toward a final metaphysical fulfillment (46).

Hawthorne, Gatta points out, resorts to the acquisition of riches as a means to express the transhistorical spiritual progress of the human community,

Not even the author of the Book of Revelation, perhaps the most bizarre and influential of all progressive chronicles, could describe the spiritual glories of the New Heaven and New Earth without resorting to pictures of material wealth—

appeals far more glittering and opulent than Hawthorne’s ingenuous report of the wealth regained by his New England saints at the close of The House of the Seven Gables. (48)

In Seven Gables Hawthorne represents the apparent advancement of society and history through the symbolic figure of “the ascending spiral curve” proposed by Clifford on the train when he is talking to a surprised passenger:

You are aware, my dear Sir [. . .] that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal.

The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and future. (Gables:

259-260)

The spiral curve, as Gatta writes, is the figure for human progress commonly used by the romantic historians (43).¹⁰⁴ Beebe, among other critics, claims that “the figure which describes the novel is not a line, but a circle spinning out from a central core, its conclusion contained in its starting point. Or, better, the geometric figure which more accurately describes The House of the Seven Gables is, as Clifford Pyncheon says of life in general, an ‘ascending spiral curve’” (3).¹⁰⁵

102 According to Gatta, Hawthorne affirms the individual pilgrim’s advance, but he is more ambiguous about the apparent progress of society and of secular history (43).

103 For more information, see: Elizabeth P. Peabody (1966). “Christ’s Idea of Society” and the “Plan of the West Roxbury Community.” Both appeared in the Dial, in 1841 and 1842, and are reprinted in Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists. Ed. George Hochfield. New York: New American Library: 336-339 and 385-391.

104 For more information, see: David Levin (1959). History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

105 Kleiman compares this “ascending spiral curve” with the metaphor of the “spiral profusion of red blossoms” of the Pyncheon garden. He views progress as a process which involves growth, change and decay (301).

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On the whole we can say that this story is not a static portrait, but a dynamic narrative, “Throughout most of the book, the narrative seems to revolve within a circle, but eventually the frame is pierced—the House of the Seven Gables is abandoned—

and a new cycle is begun. Since the new cycle begins in the old and overlaps it, the end of the novel is organically related to the beginning” (Beebe: 15). Michael Bell also thinks that “in The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne turns uncritically to the great conventional symbol of progress—the triumph of light over darkness” (219), since, at the conclusion of the romance, Phoebe becomes the ultimate representative of the forces of progress as well as of the forces of sunshine. In Hawthorne’s ending, Richard Gray sees that “the past can apparently be denied; the destructive consequences of earlier crimes may, as a matter of moral choice, be evaded; in sum, progress would seem to be possible” (102).

Both Clifford—on his railway trip——and Holgrave—before he falls in love—plead the case for change. The old bachelor, in his exhilarating speech after the Judge’s death, not only introduces the symbolic figure for progress, “the ascending spiral curve,” but also advocates radical changes in society, such as his defense of historical nomadism:

It is my firm belief and hope, that these terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody something sacred, are soon to pass out of men’s daily use, and be forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, a hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in. (Gables:263)

However, it seems that Hawthorne opposes radical change that will endanger the whole society and defends a moderate and gradual change.¹⁰⁶

Hawthorne contrasts Holgrave’s democratic spirit to the weight of the past. The daguerreotypist is the Emersonian type of man who does not believe in the values of the past and considers it as a burden. Lawrence Hall believes that “Hawthorne felt about his own generation as Holgrave feels about his. They must slough off the second-hand arrangements of the defunct past and work out their own relation to the world. This was their responsibility according to the best theories of democratic individualism” (382). Holgrave condemns the past passionately in his conversation with Phoebe in chapter 12. The young reformer attacks tradition and conservatism while defending a radical renewal of everything: “the artist inveighed against the Past and thought incineration the best cure for the ills of the House of Seven Gables” (Francis

106 For more information, see: Richard A. Yoder (1974). “Transcendental Conservatism and The House of the Seven Gables.” The Georgia Review 28: 33-51.

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Battaglia: 582).¹⁰⁷ The daguerreotypist realizes that they drag the burden of bygone times and rebels against the influence of the past on the present:

We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos! We are sick of Dead Men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity, according to Dead men's forms and creeds! Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man’s icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a Dead Man's white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves, before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in Dead men's houses; as, for instance, in this of the seven gables! (Gables:183)

Joel R. Kehler claims that “Holgrave’s is the Adamic stance of which R. W. B. Lewis speaks in showing how the ‘case against the past’ became the core of American notions of progress in the nineteenth century” (148).¹⁰⁸

Gatta says that the young reformer seems to be right about his perception of the evils man inherits from the past, but Hawthorne does not find his radical conception of social progress acceptable: the daguerreotypist is “misguided in his expectation that society can be wholly transformed within the immediate future” (44). Holgrave suffers from a naive idea of social reform. His error lies in expecting a radical change, a revolution. However, he “has to learn a moderation that sets a speed limit for history and only after having done so, is he worthy of a happy ending” (Hansen: 98). Thus the author’s criticism of Holgrave does not seem to point to the artist’s belief in advancement, but his credence in immediate progress (Michael Bell: 217). The reformer has to accept the past before he constructs a new future: “progress must be built carefully on the pyramid of the past” (Alfred Levy: 464).

Holgrave stands for the values of youth: spirituality, inexperience, impatience, hate of the past, passion. In his behavior we can see the eternal rebellion of the young against the authority of their ancestors. According to Leo B. Levy, Hawthorne’s hopes for progress are partially invested in the young reformer and it is through his opinions that he transmits his “own rather vague belief in the improvement of society through periodic repudiations of the past” (160). For Hawthorne, young people, Holgrave and Phoebe, can be a promise of a better future. Their youth and passion seem to make it possible to hope for wonderful things.

In Seven Gables, Hawthorne seems to favor slow change in contrast to Holgrave’s early radical ideas. Referring to Uncle Venner’s suit, he says of the

107 Clark Griffith agrees with Battaglia. He believes that Holgrave “a forerunner of the materialistic purifiers of Blithedale” (388).According to Buitenhuis, “Holgrave goes beyond attacking the reign of the dead and the class system: he also attacks the root ideas of a conservative, capitalist society—tradition, succession, and property” (1991: 99).

108 See: The American Adam where Lewis discusses Clifford’s Adamism rather than Holgrave’s (115).

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reformer’s initial radical attitude: “His error lay, in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork” (Gables: 180).

According to Wayne Caldwell, “Uncle Venner, through his dress and his relationship with the other characters, is the emblematic representation of this slow change, of mellowing with age into wisdom” (41). This is the position that Hawthorne adopts at the end of this romance when the daguerreotypist is “transformed from a wild-eyed reformer, despiser of the past, and hater of property to a landowner and conservative who laments that the Judge’s country house is built not of stone but of wood!”

(Buitenhuis 1991: 115).

As Waggoner points out, the tension Hawthorne experienced between the conservative and liberal views of history is established in Seven Gables (1967: 409).

Phoebe, the woman, is the conservative. Holgrave, the reformer, rebels against the past. Both conservative and radical get married. Their union has a great effect on Holgrave, who changes his attitude and comes closer to Phoebe’s conservative point of view. The daguerreotypist begins to accept the importance of the past in our lives.

He increases his domestic values. Like Hawthorne himself who had also moved from his earlier days of communitarian idealism, the young reformer seems to realize the modest role that man has in transforming society:

And when, with the years settling more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments. He would still have faith in man’s brightening destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf, and haughty faith with which he began life, would be well bartered for a humbler one at its close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities. (Gables:180; emphasis added)

Although the end of the novel is ambiguous, “the dead hand of the past, for which Hawthorne had both a healthy respect and distrust, is in part lifted” (Buitenhuis 1991:

10). Hugo McPherson argues that Hawthorne’s ultimate statement about the relation of past and present is that “The individual must, moreover, discover, as Holgrave the artist does, the meaning of the past—of his own posterity of seven generations—and make this meaning relevant to the problems of the present” (144). The past has to be overcome to be fully understood. He also claims that this involves an understanding of the relationship of America to England, “it meant the abandonment of all European pretensions and the marriage of the forces of wealth and power to the now educated native imagination. The marriage of Holgrave and Phoebe, then, is America’s attainment of mature independence” (145). It seems clear that Hawthorne intends to advocates for the present at the conclusion, despite the fact that we most feel the

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weight of the past throughout the romance. However, at the end of the book, the decaying structure of the Pyncheon mansion is still rather strong, “Hawthorne leaves the old house still standing as a powerful symbol of the past” (Buitenhuis 1991: 118).