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Who Killed Judge Pyncheon? The Role of the Imagination in the House of the Seven Gables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alfred H. Marks
Alfred H. Marks*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus 10
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Extract

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has been dead for over one hundred years, and according to F. O. Matthiessen the chapter on his death was one of the “favorite showpieces” of the age of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet there is doubt—if one may be pardoned for borrowing for a moment the pose of the hack who rewrites accounts of old murders—that the facts surrounding his death have been properly explored. Did he simply die of some kind of pulmonary hemorrhage, to which his ancestors were prone? Was no one present when he died? If he did die a natural death, is it possible that his “hereditary liability” was helped somehow, by circumstances taking place in the room with him, in precipitating his final seizure?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , June 1956 , pp. 355 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 The American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 214.

2 Cited by Randall Stewart, The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1932), p. 298.

3 “The Dual Aspects of Evil in ‘Rappaccini's Daughter’,” PMLA, LXIX (March 1954) 102.

4 I am employing designedly here the key terms of Morse Peckham's “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, LXVI (March 1951), 5–23.

5 In the Salem House reputed to be the historical original of the house in the novel, a secret staircase runs from what is assumed as being Clifford's room to the room in which the Judge was sitting. The motivation of the novel would support the interpretation that Clifford had somehow stumbled on the secret of the staircase on this morning when he had even had the temerity to play Alice Pyncheon's harpsichord. Hawthorne's dislike, however, of “bringing his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment” would seem to rule out the inference that Clifford emerged from this passage before the Judge's incredulous eyes.

6 Letter to Bridge, Lenox, 15 March 1851 (Recollections, p. 125).

7 Letter to Hawthorne, Pittsfield, Wed. morning (Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 387).

8 Ibid., p. 388.