The House of the Seven Gables: Metaphors 4 key examples

Hepzibah's teacups are old, just like she is. As they have aged, they have become more liable to breakage. Hepzibah claims that her heart has not "broken" in all she has gone through, but the narrator uses Hepzibah's metaphor to emphasize the ways in which her heart has all but broken in two. The cups have not been used since Hepzibah was young and are thus covered in dust. Hepzibah, too, has been shut up in the House of the Seven Gables, which is essentially a storage cupboard for humanity. She, too, has been collecting dust instead of being held or made use of by her fellow humans. She has grown more fragile and less presentable over the years. Opening her cent shop is painful for her in part because her social and economic skills have atrophied from disuse. Just as the teacups must be cleaned before they can be used, Hepzibah requires preparation before she is ready to interact much with the public.

Phoebe is in many senses a young version of Hepzibah. Her father, Arthur Pyncheon, married a poor woman and lost touch with the rest of the Pyncheons. Arthur has since died. Phoebe is trying to have some relationship with the Pyncheons still, but she faces a life not unlike Hepzibah's: she will probably have some access to family wealth but will largely have to do for herself. The difference between the two of them is that Phoebe knows how to work and how to be cheery about it. In this scene, Phoebe carefully cleans off the teacups, demonstrating that she knows how to care for a home. As the chapter goes on, she shows Hepzibah how to run the cent shop with a smile on her face. There is some hope that Hepzibah will be able to turn her life around under Phoebe's instruction. Still, the chapter is titled "May and November." This title and the two women's ongoing behavior suggest that Hepzibah is in the declining "November" of her life, whereas Phoebe is in the hopeful "May" of her life. Furthermore, Hepzibah is clinging to a dying "November" model of femininity. The novel suggests that aristocratic ladies who refuse to work are no longer going to survive in the United States. Instead, the blooming "May" model of femininity is Phoebe, hardworking and happy. The "lady" is being replaced by the "housewife" who does not just live in the house as a haven, but actively maintains it and turns it into her own workplace.

Clifford is blowing soap bubbles into the street from the arched window in the house. Hawthorne plays with language about size to help the reader envision the soap bubbles as scaled down replicas of the entire world. First, he conjures an image of the "airy spheres" in the mind's eye of the reader. Then, he recasts the soap bubbles as "little impalpable worlds." This language still emphasizes the small size of the bubbles, but it also forces the reader to imagine "worlds" into that small space. The little worlds are "impalpable," meaning "untouchable." In a literal sense, the soap bubbles can't be touched without bursting. On a metaphorical level, the idea of such easily-burst globes gets at the idea that the world itself is both more fragile than we might imagine it to be and as difficult to pin down and examine in one's hand as a soap bubble.

Part of why the world is difficult to pin down seems to be that it is rapidly changing with new technology. Hawthorne often explores scale and the way it is changing in conjunction with technology, especially photography and the railroad. Photography allows both the subject and the viewer of a photo to be in two times at once -- the time when the photo is taken, and the time when it is viewed. The idea that two far-apart moments in time can collapse together allows Hawthorne at times to describe eerie effects. For instance, in Chapter 10, Clifford's post-incarceration life at home seems to restore him, impossibly, to the version of himself in Hepzibah's old miniature of him:

He had not merely grown young—he was a child again.

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It is impossible for someone to truly age backward and become a child again, but Hawthorne draws on the time-bending powers of photography to imagine that the scale of time actually distorts for Clifford as he recovers his happiness. Similarly, the railroad allows people to travel from one place to the next in what seemed, in the 19th century, an impossibly short amount of time. Clifford remarks on this fantastical change in the scale of the whole country when he and Hepzibah are aboard the train in Chapter 17. Riding the railroad, to him, is almost like being in two places at once. He must entirely reorient himself to the experience of seeing the landscape whizz by outside his window because humans have never been able to travel so quickly before. But, as Clifford also notes in his speech, the technology of the railroad will continue to change. Trying to settle into a new understanding of time, space, and distance is as futile as trying to catch a soap bubble.

Clifford is blowing soap bubbles into the street from the arched window in the house. Hawthorne plays with language about size to help the reader envision the soap bubbles as scaled down replicas of the entire world. First, he conjures an image of the "airy spheres" in the mind's eye of the reader. Then, he recasts the soap bubbles as "little impalpable worlds." This language still emphasizes the small size of the bubbles, but it also forces the reader to imagine "worlds" into that small space. The little worlds are "impalpable," meaning "untouchable." In a literal sense, the soap bubbles can't be touched without bursting. On a metaphorical level, the idea of such easily-burst globes gets at the idea that the world itself is both more fragile than we might imagine it to be and as difficult to pin down and examine in one's hand as a soap bubble.

Part of why the world is difficult to pin down seems to be that it is rapidly changing with new technology. Hawthorne often explores scale and the way it is changing in conjunction with technology, especially photography and the railroad. Photography allows both the subject and the viewer of a photo to be in two times at once -- the time when the photo is taken, and the time when it is viewed. The idea that two far-apart moments in time can collapse together allows Hawthorne at times to describe eerie effects. For instance, in Chapter 10, Clifford's post-incarceration life at home seems to restore him, impossibly, to the version of himself in Hepzibah's old miniature of him:

He had not merely grown young—he was a child again.

Cite this Quote

It is impossible for someone to truly age backward and become a child again, but Hawthorne draws on the time-bending powers of photography to imagine that the scale of time actually distorts for Clifford as he recovers his happiness. Similarly, the railroad allows people to travel from one place to the next in what seemed, in the 19th century, an impossibly short amount of time. Clifford remarks on this fantastical change in the scale of the whole country when he and Hepzibah are aboard the train in Chapter 17. Riding the railroad, to him, is almost like being in two places at once. He must entirely reorient himself to the experience of seeing the landscape whizz by outside his window because humans have never been able to travel so quickly before. But, as Clifford also notes in his speech, the technology of the railroad will continue to change. Trying to settle into a new understanding of time, space, and distance is as futile as trying to catch a soap bubble.

Clifford is awed by the technological advances that have been made while he has been in prison. He has spent much of the industrial age locked away: the world looks very different than it did when he was young. He has been marveling over the railroad, but the railroad was not electrified until the end of the 19th century (it ran on steam before this). Rather, as the man he is talking to guesses, Clifford seems to be referring to the recent invention of the telegraph. This new invention facilitated the rapid transmission of information across vast distances. Through the telegraph, Clifford imagines, the world becomes one "great nerve" along which data can travel. He nuances his point by imagining that it is the telegraph lines that constitute the nerve, and that the globe is in fact "a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence." This personification of the globe still does not quite capture the point he is trying to make. He goes on to claim that the electrified globe has in fact surpassed the form of the human brain, becoming abstract thought that has no "substance" at all. Clifford does not mean that the thought is meaningless. Rather, he means that the world is no longer a material thing bound by the laws of physics. Thought can move from one part of the world to the next in what seems like less than an instant. Whereas the transmission of thought used to be bound by the speed with which human bodies could carry it from one place to the next, the world now seems to be thinking independent of these physical limitations.

Of course, Clifford is not exactly correct. Even today, when information travels much, much faster than it did in the mid-19th century, the transmission of information can only happen as quickly as physics allow. Humans have simply continued to invent technologies that take advantage of the laws of physics to move information faster and faster. But at the time Hawthorne was writing, it was marvelous and novel to imagine that the transmission of information could be unbound from the physical limitations of the human body to carry ideas or letters from one place to the next. Clifford uses personification to articulate the way the electrified world first takes the place of human messengers and then surpasses even their capabilities.

The "ascending spiral" Clifford mentions here is a metaphor he has developed to describe history. He claims that history moves not in a straight line or in a flat circle, but rather in an upward spiral. People today circle back to experiences people had a generation before and a generation before that, but each generation has improved upon these shared experiences. For example, Clifford claims that the railroad has "spiritualized travel." What he means is that passenger trains have taken away the unpleasant bodily experience of travel people used to have. To 21st-century readers, sitting on a train may sound like a cramped experience. To Clifford and other 19th-century travelers, though, watching the world go by through a train window while sitting in relative comfort was a novel experience. Whereas travel once meant bumping along in a dusty wagon, or riding a horse, or even trudging on foot from point A to point B, Clifford is now able to feel his "spirit" fly from one town to the next without his body breaking a sweat. He is unbound from bodily limitations in a way the previous generation never could have imagined. He predicts that future generations will find a way to "spiritualize" travel even further by turning the train whistle into pleasant music and by making the ride even smoother.

Clifford's metaphor allows him to posit that travel is not the uncomfortable experience it once was. The man with whom he is arguing has suggested that it is folly to prefer travel to a life spent relaxing in one's own house. Clifford rebuts by challenging the set of facts the man is working with. A generation before, it may have been more comfortable to relax in a house, but travel has fundamentally changed. Clifford has in fact found it highly uncomfortable to be anchored to the House of the Seven Gables and the sordid history attached to it. Through Clifford, Hawthorne here challenges readers to imagine what it might mean to abandon the notion that owning a house is the key to comfort and happiness. Instead, he argues, there might be a superior comfort and happiness available through the freedom of travel in the industrialized world.