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Definition of Motif
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the central themes of a book... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of... read full definition
Chapter 3: The First Customer
Explanation and Analysis—Appetite:
Grotesque appetites are a motif in the novel. One example occurs in Chapter 3, when young Ned Higgins seems to be insatiably hungry for Hepzibah's gingerbread cookies (which are themselves an allusion):
She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim Crow at the window, when again the shop bell tinkled clamorously, and again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar, disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago, had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast, as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.
The cookie Ned has just devoured is a "representative of the renowned Jim Crow." Jim Crow was a popular blackface minstrel character in the 19th century, after whom the "Jim Crow era" of the 20th century was named. Drawing on an African American folk figure named Jim Crow, a white playwright and performer named Thomas D. Rice made money by donning blackface makeup and performing as a racist caricature of a Black person. Wright's performance was pitched toward white audiences. It aimed to make them laugh by exaggerating the differences between a white man and the Black stereotypes he was embodying. This performance and the character at its center became so popular that the character's image began to appear everywhere. With the development of technologies in photography and printing, images of Jim Crow started to show up even on mundane household items such as plates, an everyday reminder of the supposed inhumanity of Black people. In her cent shop, Hepzibah is selling likenesses of Jim Crow in the form of a cookie.
Ned devours the cookie and comes back for more, the crumbs and stains from his "cannibalism" still on his face. He can't stop eating up Jim Crow. His appetite is an unsettling representation of American consumerism, which Hepzibah and Hawthorne alike find rather distasteful. Ned should be satisfied with one cookie, but he is back for seconds before even cleaning up the mess from his first cookie. Ned is putting no critical thought into what he is consuming; whatever the market makes for him to consume, including distasteful and racist images of Jim Crow, he will gladly swallow.
What's more, the idea that Ned is a "cannibal" flips the usual script by which 19th century Americans discussed race. Colonists frequently called Black and Indigenous people "cannibals" in order to dehumanize them and excuse colonial violence against them. Here, a little white boy is a cannibal consuming a Black body. Racism is still at play: part of what Hawthorne seems to imagine will make this scene unsettling to white readers is that consumerism is giving Ned the insatiable appetite of a "savage" non-white cannibal.
Ned appears again and again with the same appetite for Hepzibah's gingerbread cookies, all in the shapes of living creatures. But his is not the only insatiable appetite. The entire plot is driven by the Maules' and the Pyncheons' appetites for wealth and property. The more they want, the more unhappy they are. Although the deed to the land in Maine is eventually revealed at the end of the novel, the real happy ending comes with everyone's freedom from the House of the Seven Gables, and from the appetite for wealth that has long cut them off from healthy community among their fellow humans.
Related Themes:
Chapter 5: May and November
Explanation and Analysis—Light and Dark:
The contrast between light and dark imagery is a motif in the novel. In Chapter 5, when Phoebe first wakes up in the House of the Seven Gables, her very presence brings light to an otherwise dark and gloomy house:
There were curtains to Phoebe’s bed; a dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner [...]. The morning light, however, soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the new guest there—with a bloom on her cheeks like the morning’s own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as when an early breeze moves the foliage—the dawn kissed her brow.
Phoebe's bed, a fixture of the house, has curtains and a "dark, antique canopy" that lends less opulence than gloom to the bed. It "broods" above her "like a cloud, making night in that one corner" even in the morning. The atmosphere of the house where Hepzibah has been living mostly alone for years is like that of a stormy day, when clouds block out the light and make it seem like nighttime at all hours. Phoebe does not just represent light herself; furthermore, she seems to pull light toward her. Lying under the dark canopy, she attracts the morning light. It "steals" in through a small opening in the curtains and "finds" her there, as though it has been looking for her since she disappeared into the house. Despite the emotional and physical darkness of the house, Phoebe still manages to awake "with a bloom on her cheeks...and a gentle stir" as though she is a leaf fluttering in the wind. She brings the outside world into the House of the Seven Gables for the first time in years and makes it a little brighter and more breathable inside.
This is not the only instance in which Phoebe functions like a ray of light penetrating the darkest corners of the house. She is described as the "May" to Hepzibah's "November," and she truly seems to turn the seasons within the house. Still, certain corners of the house remain darker than it seems they ought to, and Phoebe herself begins to shine less brightly the longer she is there. Phoebe's light represents the promise of a future Pyncheon family that has unburdened itself from the sins of its past. The darkness of the house, meanwhile, represents the stubbornness of the stain those sins have left. Only by shedding real light on the past sins (uncovering the truth of Uncle Jaffrey's death, discovering the deed for the land in Maine, and marrying into the Maule family they once stole from) can the Pyncheons lighten up their lives for good.
Related Themes:
Chapter 6: Maule’s Well
Explanation and Analysis—Death and Decay:
A motif in the novel is suggestive images of rot, decay, and corpses. For example, in Chapter 6, Hawthorne describes the garden around Maule's well:
The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and seed vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings.
This is not a simple description of a garden full of dead plants. Rather, Hawthorne emphasizes how plants have decomposed into their various parts, and how those parts have "fed" the "black, rich soil" to make it more fertile for years to come. Uncultivated weeds ("vagrant and lawless plants") have their greatest use for this soil after they die and break down into fertilizer. Utility to the "black, rich soil" does not necessarily mean that these plants are being put to use for good. In fact, Hawthorne goes on to write that the plants help "the evil of these departed years" spring up with new life, like more unwanted but unchecked weeds.
Hawthorne seems to be getting at something oddly specific through this intense nature imagery. He writes that these "rank weeds" are "symbolic of the transmitted vices of society." What he means becomes clearer through other instances of the motif. For instance, in Chapter 12, Holgrave tells Phoebe:
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart!
Here is an image of a corpse's "icy hand" reaching out of its grave to stop living people from exercising free will. Even when we look in the direction we want to go, Holgrave claims, we see the image of a dead man's face and can no longer imagine going in that direction. These images were not uncommon in political writing during the 18th and 19th centuries, when many nations were rethinking the extent to which dead leaders should have a say over government in the present. To what extent should someone who is no longer alive be able to dictate the laws by which their descendants live? In this context, the dead garden imagery of Chapter 6 turns into a horrifying scene in which the ground is poisoned by the endlessly recycled bad ideas of dead people. Hawthorne does not imagine, as Holgrave does, that it is possible to wholly reject the dead. He uses images of rot, decay, and corpses to reckon with the difficulty of living in the present when the ground on which our institutions sit (both literally and figuratively) is full of dead people and dead ideas that can't be rooted out.
Related Themes:
Chapter 10: The Pyncheon Garden
Explanation and Analysis—Soap Bubble Worlds:
Scale (the shrinking and expanding of time and space) is a motif in the novel. One instance occurs in Chapter 11, when Hawthorne uses a metaphor to compare soap bubbles to entire worlds:
Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad, from the window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those soap bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface.
Clifford is blowing soap bubbles into the street from the arched window in the house. Hawthorne plays with language about size to help the reader envision the soap bubbles as scaled down replicas of the entire world. First, he conjures an image of the "airy spheres" in the mind's eye of the reader. Then, he recasts the soap bubbles as "little impalpable worlds." This language still emphasizes the small size of the bubbles, but it also forces the reader to imagine "worlds" into that small space. The little worlds are "impalpable," meaning "untouchable." In a literal sense, the soap bubbles can't be touched without bursting. On a metaphorical level, the idea of such easily-burst globes gets at the idea that the world itself is both more fragile than we might imagine it to be and as difficult to pin down and examine in one's hand as a soap bubble.
Part of why the world is difficult to pin down seems to be that it is rapidly changing with new technology. Hawthorne often explores scale and the way it is changing in conjunction with technology, especially photography and the railroad. Photography allows both the subject and the viewer of a photo to be in two times at once -- the time when the photo is taken, and the time when it is viewed. The idea that two far-apart moments in time can collapse together allows Hawthorne at times to describe eerie effects. For instance, in Chapter 10, Clifford's post-incarceration life at home seems to restore him, impossibly, to the version of himself in Hepzibah's old miniature of him:
He had not merely grown young—he was a child again.
It is impossible for someone to truly age backward and become a child again, but Hawthorne draws on the time-bending powers of photography to imagine that the scale of time actually distorts for Clifford as he recovers his happiness. Similarly, the railroad allows people to travel from one place to the next in what seemed, in the 19th century, an impossibly short amount of time. Clifford remarks on this fantastical change in the scale of the whole country when he and Hepzibah are aboard the train in Chapter 17. Riding the railroad, to him, is almost like being in two places at once. He must entirely reorient himself to the experience of seeing the landscape whizz by outside his window because humans have never been able to travel so quickly before. But, as Clifford also notes in his speech, the technology of the railroad will continue to change. Trying to settle into a new understanding of time, space, and distance is as futile as trying to catch a soap bubble.
Related Themes:
Chapter 11: The Arched Window
Explanation and Analysis—Soap Bubble Worlds:
Scale (the shrinking and expanding of time and space) is a motif in the novel. One instance occurs in Chapter 11, when Hawthorne uses a metaphor to compare soap bubbles to entire worlds:
Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad, from the window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those soap bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface.
Clifford is blowing soap bubbles into the street from the arched window in the house. Hawthorne plays with language about size to help the reader envision the soap bubbles as scaled down replicas of the entire world. First, he conjures an image of the "airy spheres" in the mind's eye of the reader. Then, he recasts the soap bubbles as "little impalpable worlds." This language still emphasizes the small size of the bubbles, but it also forces the reader to imagine "worlds" into that small space. The little worlds are "impalpable," meaning "untouchable." In a literal sense, the soap bubbles can't be touched without bursting. On a metaphorical level, the idea of such easily-burst globes gets at the idea that the world itself is both more fragile than we might imagine it to be and as difficult to pin down and examine in one's hand as a soap bubble.
Part of why the world is difficult to pin down seems to be that it is rapidly changing with new technology. Hawthorne often explores scale and the way it is changing in conjunction with technology, especially photography and the railroad. Photography allows both the subject and the viewer of a photo to be in two times at once -- the time when the photo is taken, and the time when it is viewed. The idea that two far-apart moments in time can collapse together allows Hawthorne at times to describe eerie effects. For instance, in Chapter 10, Clifford's post-incarceration life at home seems to restore him, impossibly, to the version of himself in Hepzibah's old miniature of him:
He had not merely grown young—he was a child again.
It is impossible for someone to truly age backward and become a child again, but Hawthorne draws on the time-bending powers of photography to imagine that the scale of time actually distorts for Clifford as he recovers his happiness. Similarly, the railroad allows people to travel from one place to the next in what seemed, in the 19th century, an impossibly short amount of time. Clifford remarks on this fantastical change in the scale of the whole country when he and Hepzibah are aboard the train in Chapter 17. Riding the railroad, to him, is almost like being in two places at once. He must entirely reorient himself to the experience of seeing the landscape whizz by outside his window because humans have never been able to travel so quickly before. But, as Clifford also notes in his speech, the technology of the railroad will continue to change. Trying to settle into a new understanding of time, space, and distance is as futile as trying to catch a soap bubble.
Related Themes:
Chapter 12: The Daguerreotypist
Explanation and Analysis—Death and Decay:
A motif in the novel is suggestive images of rot, decay, and corpses. For example, in Chapter 6, Hawthorne describes the garden around Maule's well:
The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and seed vessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings.
This is not a simple description of a garden full of dead plants. Rather, Hawthorne emphasizes how plants have decomposed into their various parts, and how those parts have "fed" the "black, rich soil" to make it more fertile for years to come. Uncultivated weeds ("vagrant and lawless plants") have their greatest use for this soil after they die and break down into fertilizer. Utility to the "black, rich soil" does not necessarily mean that these plants are being put to use for good. In fact, Hawthorne goes on to write that the plants help "the evil of these departed years" spring up with new life, like more unwanted but unchecked weeds.
Hawthorne seems to be getting at something oddly specific through this intense nature imagery. He writes that these "rank weeds" are "symbolic of the transmitted vices of society." What he means becomes clearer through other instances of the motif. For instance, in Chapter 12, Holgrave tells Phoebe:
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart!
Here is an image of a corpse's "icy hand" reaching out of its grave to stop living people from exercising free will. Even when we look in the direction we want to go, Holgrave claims, we see the image of a dead man's face and can no longer imagine going in that direction. These images were not uncommon in political writing during the 18th and 19th centuries, when many nations were rethinking the extent to which dead leaders should have a say over government in the present. To what extent should someone who is no longer alive be able to dictate the laws by which their descendants live? In this context, the dead garden imagery of Chapter 6 turns into a horrifying scene in which the ground is poisoned by the endlessly recycled bad ideas of dead people. Hawthorne does not imagine, as Holgrave does, that it is possible to wholly reject the dead. He uses images of rot, decay, and corpses to reckon with the difficulty of living in the present when the ground on which our institutions sit (both literally and figuratively) is full of dead people and dead ideas that can't be rooted out.
Related Themes:
