Phoebe is No Pyncheon: Class, Gender, And Nation in the House of the Seven Gables

Recent criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) has contributed to the reconsideration of the conflict between the plebeian Maules and aristocratic Pyncheons from various points of view such as race, politics, and gender; (1) yet no one has seriously questioned the premise that this conflict comprises the novel's central concern. (2) A further investigation of how intimately the issue of class intertwines with that of gender reveals the way Hawthorne complicates the conflict from its very beginning, making it something more than and different from a simple family feud. Instead, it resides more essentially between the masculine and the feminine in ways that cross family lines. Indeed, the female Pyncheons are figuratively "Maulized" while the Maules are feminized, both under the male Pyncheons' paternal dominion. Accordingly, to arrive at the common critical view that the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave provides "the interclass marriage" (Lang 40) which resolves the Pyncheon-Maule conflict overlooks the ambiguity regarding Phoebe's status as a Pyncheon. (3) Phoebe herself is "the daughter of a mixed-class marriage" (Goddu 123)--that is, the embodiment of "cross-class marriage"--and, though a cousin of Hepzibah and Clifford, she is portrayed more as a plebeian than as an aristocrat. Moreover, in presenting Phoebe's domesticity, Hawthorne adopts the contemporaneous idea that a girl is a miniaturized model of domestic woman and blends it with the idea of genealogical inheritance, thereby linking Phoebe's practical talents at housekeeping with the plebeian bloodlines of her mother. The marriage of Holgrave and Phoebe therefore can be viewed more appropriately as a union of two plebeians. (4) From this vantage, the end of Seven Gables cannot simply be reduced to a happy resolution of the class conflict, for it also submits a new model of family/nation whereby the feminine has more dominant power and whereby the notion of class itself transforms from the old one consisting of "aristocracy" and "plebeian" to a new one based on domesticity. In the nineteenth-century domestic culture, girlhood is often defined as a kind of training period for becoming a domestic woman. Melanie Dawson, examining the difference between boys' play and girls' play in the nineteenth century, views a girl as a miniature of a woman. While boys are "rebellious, youthful," "animated," and "childlike" in their play, girls are "socialized," "domesticated," and "mature" in theirs (Dawson 64-65). Thus, "as a sign of their overt socializing of young women, nineteenth-century texts about youth miniaturize girlhood, constructing the girl as an idealized woman in waiting" (Dawson 68). The book entitled Remarks on Children's Play (1819) expects "a future of mothering and caretaking for its female subjects" and "encourages young women to approach domestic play as 'imitative,'" whereby a girl copies what her mother or nurse does (Dawson 68).