Fate In The House Of Seven Gables

The House of Seven Gables is filled with many themes, ranging from fate to ethics. In this essay, the reader will become acquainted with the theme of fate and freewill. While not all of the family members turn bad, and some are normal, nice people, the freewill of the people of the Pyncheon family may be tied to fate because the characters’ who turn bad often have more than one personality, the affected family members usually end up dead, and many in the family line seem to be affected by the curse.
The House of Seven Gables shows a theme of the family’s freewill being tied into a question of fate. When the Pyncheon family first comes upon the property the house was built on, it was because Colonel Pyncheon wrongfully seized Matthew Maule’s …show more content…
The appearances seem to tie the fate to members, and one quote that stands out to the reader is, “Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom, from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and, to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity.” (Hawthorn, 82) Earlier in the book, the reader was introduced to Judge Pyncheon, whom Hawthorn shows with having cold, cruel, ambition. It seems that genetics are the doom of the Pyncheon family, and the appearance of Judge Pyncheon as seen here by Phoebe, seems to factor into that. Being a matter of genetics, it seems that each generation of the Pyncheon family gives into the family specific “weaknesses and defect,” those being false pride, vanity, and hypocrisy. The narrator tells us that Judge Pyncheon has been doomed since the time he was born to the same fate that Colonel Pyncheon faced. However, this conclusion is drawn by the narrator using

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