The House as Container: Architecture in The House of the Seven Gables

It is argued that the Pyncheon house in The House of the Seven Gables is a metaphor of the family, a container for memory and culture, a structure with a body and soul, a text with two levels of meanings, and that its architecture is a cultural expression, an index of Hawthorne’s oeuvre, an external representation of the individuality of the Pyncheons, a means of reconstructing and materializing the past, and a replica of the architectural construction of characters constituting Hawthorne’s remarkable building in the novel.