SYmbolism in Hawthorne
SYmbolism in HawthorneAngel Zamot
Composition and Rhetoric – DeShane
November 10, 2000
Final Paper
The Sins of the Father
“Let me make you an offer you can’t refuse,” is the line usually associated with mafia-based movies or associated with extortionist. In a movie by director Frank Coppala known as The Godfather, this is a line that is well used by the head of a Sicilian family who are into this practice of extortion. Later on in the third segment of this trilogy, the second generation of this family played by actor Al Pacino is seen wanting to get out of the family business in hopes of living a normal life. Throughout the entire movie, his overzealous nephew makes that impossible for the family causing the death of the character played by Pacino’s daughter. Later on the final scene is Al Pacino in some sort of field alone and dying an old, frail man overwhelmed by his family’s sins. The theme that is well associated with this movie is that the sins of the father will eventually catch up with every new and passing generation and will not be laid to rest. This theme the sins of the father, has been expressed not only in movies but in literary works as well. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book The House of the Seven Gables, that same theme can be found in the pages of his literary work. The theme that one man’s sins can affect an entire family line is prevelant throughout the story of the Pyncheon family. In the novel, Hawthorne communicates his theme the sins of the fathers to the reader in three ways: in his plot, in his characters’ development, and in the way he uses sub-themes within the book.
The plot in The House of the Seven Gables, from the very beginning communicates to the reader that Colonel Pyncheon’s lust for possession of Maule’s property develops the oppression weighed down on future Pyncheons. The wrong done by one generation of a family is visited upon the generations that follow. We are introduced early in the novel by, the greed that drove Colonel Pyncheon to encourage the persecution of Maule, and then to seize Maule’s land for his homestead, brings down a curse upon all of the Colonel’s descendants. His desire and motivation to do this insidious act weighs down on the present and influences everything the next generation Pycheons will do. In his description of the house he states:
“Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity”.(2)
It is in my opinion, that this description...
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