The House of the Seven Gables: Similes 2 key examples

The narrator takes a speculative tone, refusing to say outright that the Judge is guilty of anything in particular. However, the narrator asks the reader to "venture" to imagine that the Judge has an ever-renewing "daily guilt" that blooms red over and over again "like the miraculous bloodstain of a murder." The Judge does not necessarily realize at every moment the toll this guilty "bloodstain" is taking on him, but Hepzibah is able to see what he is not.

Although Hepzibah's main weakness is that she is fearful and contemptuous of her neighbors and therefore isolates herself, her suspicion of Judge Pyncheon turns out at the end of the book not to be a symptom of her general paranoia. Judge Pyncheon is responsible for pinning the death of the house's former owner on Clifford. He attained ownership of the House of the Seven Gables through theft and the years-long sacrifice of Clifford's freedom. The simile the narrator uses, comparing the Judge's guilt to "the miraculous bloodstain of a murder," contributes to the foreshadowing of Judge Pyncheon's disgraceful end. Although the Judge did not directly murder his uncle to attain the house, he might be said to be partially responsible for his death. After all, as it turns out, Uncle Jaffrey died from an unknown congenital disease that causes blood to suddenly burble up out of Pyncheon men's mouths and seemingly choke them to death. The disease struck when Uncle Jaffrey found the younger Judge Pyncheon rifling through his papers -- Judge Pyncheon essentially shocked his uncle to death and "gave him blood to drink." Judge Pyncheon's guilt manifests each day like more blood burbling up until the day this sordid history is revealed. Judge Pyncheon himself eventually suffers the same hereditary fate as his uncle and Colonel Pyncheon. It is almost as if his guilt eventually does turn into real blood that chokes the life out of him.

Hawthorne compares Judge Pyncheon to "a defunct nightmare" that has died and "left its flabby corpse on the breast" of the person who was dreaming. Nightmares were often depicted in art and literature at this time as demons called incubi and succubi. An incubus was a male demon that would try to have sex with a sleeping woman; a succubus was essentially the gender-swapped version of an incubus. In 1781, John Henry Fuseli painted a very famous depiction of an incubus sitting directly on a woman's chest while she either slept or swooned. Her head dangles off the edge of the bed, and she looks helpless to move the incubus off of her. Meanwhile, a mare (a "nightmare") peeks around the edge of the bed's curtains, watching the entire scene. The painting, "The Nightmare," made especially popular the image of an incubus or succubus that sits on top of someone's chest while they have bad dreams.

Hawthorne is not necessarily alluding directly to the painting, but this general image seems to be what he has in mind. Judge Pyncheon is the incubus, except that he has died while haunting the inhabitants of the House of the Seven Gables. Clifford and Hepzibah leave him sitting in the chair. Although they are momentarily free from his torment, someone is still going to have to remove his corpse from the ancestral chair before the house and the two families who belong to it will truly be able to shrug off the effects of the "defunct nightmare" Judge Pyncheon embodies.