From the start, Hawthorne describes the House of the Seven Gables as if it were human; he says, "The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance . . . expressive of the long lapse of mortal life." Personification continues in later descriptions of the house as "a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and somber reminiscences," its "meditative look" suggesting "that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon." The old Pyncheon mansion contains the collective consciousness of a single family; it is a sort of domesticated American version of a European gothic castle. The old and haunted house will, as we will see, permeate the minds of its aging inhabitants.
Clifford thinks of himself and Hepzibah as ghosts, doomed to haunt their accursed house. Hawthorne, however, says that they have protracted their own anguish: Their hearts have been dungeons, and each person has become his own jailer; the house is a larger equivalent of that dungeon. Both Clifford and Hepzibah, like Roderick and Madeline Usher in Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" face a future that is also, strangely enough, the past, for they can only become, in a manner of speaking, what they already are. Prisoners of time, they are equally prisoners of space; that space is expanded into an entire house and its environs.
The orientation of the house signifies its place midway between two civilizations. It faces the commerce of the street on the west, while to the rear is an old garden. Its exterior is darkened by the "prevalent east wind," and the house contains within its gloomy halls a map of what is consistently referred to as the "Eastern claim." The land itself extends only as far east as Waldo County, Maine, but it is associated with the "princely territory" of Europe, and it symbolizes the aristocratic tradition of the Pyncheon clan, with its "antique portraits, pedigrees, and coats of arms." This trait is best personified in "foreign-bred" Gervayse Pyncheon, grandson of the old Colonel, whose efforts to obtain the "eastern claim" were motivated by his desire to return to England, "that more congenial home." His daughter Alice was also inordinately proud, and her beauty, her flowers, and her music all reflected this trait.
