The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Published 1851 · 104,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Gothic Fiction
How hard is The House of the Seven Gables to read?
The House of the Seven Gables scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Mid-nineteenth-century literary English with Latinate diction, archaic phrasing, and Hawthorne's characteristic moral vocabulary. Requires patience with period prose.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Long, winding sentences with parenthetical qualifications and embedded metaphors. Hawthorne's style is deliberate and ornate, building meaning through accumulation.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Hawthorne frequently moves between concrete description and moral allegory. The house is simultaneously a real building and a symbol of inherited sin.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- The pacing is leisurely, with extended descriptive passages and authorial commentary. Events unfold slowly within a richly elaborated setting.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Hawthorne employs an intrusive narrator who comments on events and characters, sometimes withholding judgment, sometimes offering it ambiguously.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The house, the garden, the well, the portrait, the daguerreotype — nearly every element carries symbolic weight. Hawthorne builds allegory into the physical world of the novel.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Hawthorne maintains a gentle irony toward his characters' pretensions but treats their suffering with genuine sympathy. The narrator's tone blends humor with moral seriousness.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The plot resolves clearly with the villain's death and the protagonists' liberation. The ending is notably sunnier than the rest of the novel.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- A straightforward chronological narrative organized around a single setting. The complexity is thematic and symbolic rather than structural.
How The House of the Seven Gables is regarded
The House of the Seven Gables holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.