Do we really need Hawthorne's word to tell us?— The House of the Seven Gables was intended to be a “sunnier” book than The Scarlet Letter. That remarkable work, which buried Hester next to Dimmesdale, but not close enough for their ashes to mingle, and which had sent Sophia Hawthorne to bed with an “esthetic headache,” had most certainly failed to discover any “sweet moral blossom” which might “relieve the darkening tale of human frailty and sorrow.” But was not the affect of that tale much gloomier than Hawthorne knew his own to be? Would not his audience form the wrong impression of the happily married man who produced it? So this next novel, begun within a few months of The Scarlet Letter's publication, was written with something like a will to happiness: plausibly mated or not, Holgrave and Phoebe will discover one another within the glow of that romance that makes the world ever new; and such old-time curses as refuse to vanish even when called out by the name of superstition will have to be content with the half-life of remission, memory, and romance.

Nor is it only the plot that appears to have a will of its own. For all that the book's protagonist incorporates— spouts, in places— the secular ideology of Thomas Jefferson, its lurking theology comes pretty close to being a gloss on the lingering question of “something, somehow like original sin”: could that sort of thing really be inherited, genetically, in the same way as certain physical and mental traits, of the Pyncheons and their chickens? The romantic plot may seem to imply that the white magic of a little country-girl goodness can effectively counteract the force of an inbred and self-repeating evil that has had the world its own way for several centuries. But there is room for doubt. And anyone who, like Austin Warren, has ever worried that Hawthorne was the sort of more-than-Puritan thinker who believed in sin but not in grace should consider the aptness of Hyatt Waggoner's opposing conclusion, that The House of the Seven Gables contains Hawthorne's “Pelagian Heresy.”