Who is alice pyncheon

Through an era of economic expansion, it urged its readers to amplify the physical comforts and aesthetic delights of their homes. Every issue carried instructions for fanciwork items to wear or display. A longrunning feature was "Godey's Cottages," which showed how to remodel simple homes with ornamental additions in styles like the Gothic or the bracketed.

Recent scholarship3 has emphasized the magazine's contribution to the religion of domesticity and its depiction of the home as a counterbalance to the prevailing American values of individualism and commercialism. But the home Godey's glorified, in issue after issue, is—somewhat ambiguously—both an oasis of peace in the competitive world and a showcase for material success. The magazine was also consistently apolitical, concentrating upon the personal and domestic arts and ornaments to which its "lady readers" were assumed to be devoted, and its fiction reflected this editorial policy.

In , when The House of Seven Gables appeared, Godey's had just completed its most successful decade as a literary Notes magazine. Once a beautiful young man, Clifford is broken by the thirty years he spends in prison for allegedly murdering his uncle, old Jaffrey Pyncheon. Clifford hates his cousin, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, who may have framed him for the murder of their uncle.

Read an in-depth analysis of Clifford Pyncheon. The wealthy, popular cousin of Hepzibah and Clifford, Judge Pyncheon is the closest to their stern ancestor, Colonel Pyncheon.

With his brilliant smile, he is viewed, by himself and by others, as a pillar of the community, but his is in fact a dark and greedy nature. No one knows that Holgrave is actually a descendant of the first Matthew Maule. This link has given him hypnotic powers, but does not prevent him from falling in love with Phoebe Pyncheon. Read an in-depth analysis of Holgrave. Although she lacks the aristocratic upbringing of her cousins Hepzibah and Clifford, Phoebe Pyncheon is a young, vibrant, and beautiful young woman who brings a note of cheer to the gloomy Pyncheon house.

This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin.

All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists.

But such incredible incidents are merely to be mentioned aside. Pyncheon, in amazement at the proposal. I have no other terms to propose. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might at least be made matter of discussion. He himself had no personal attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with his childish residence in it. On the contrary, after seven-and-thirty years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it, as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair.

His long abode in foreign parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point of splendor or convenience.

It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to support after realizing his territorial rights. His steward might deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor himself. The eastern claim once fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr. Lord Pyncheon! Pyncheon could scarcely forbear laughing in his face.

He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for the immense service to be rendered. According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the presence of witnesses. Others say that Matthew Maule was contented with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his honor and integrity to the fulfilment of the terms concluded upon.

The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank together, in confirmation of their bargain. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he thought he beheld his grandfather frown. Pyncheon, haughtily; and now, at last, there was anger mixed up with his pride. There was, at least, an assignable motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever, for the last.

Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a mysterious kind of explanation, — which made the matter considerably darker than it looked before, — that the only chance of acquiring the requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice. Not to encumber our story with Mr. So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared. A portrait of this young lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England, is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and the high character of beauty in the countenance.

Yet there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender foot upon his heart. All that he would have required, was simply the acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellow-being, moulded of the same elements as she.

But that admiring glance which most other men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection, all through life the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself that made Maule so subtile in his perception. You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with which you try to bring back sunny recollections. With yourself, it is now to begin! Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion.

The importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it.

Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate? Alice complied. She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power, — combined of beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of womanhood, — that could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by treachery within.

She instinctively knew, it may be, that some sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor would she decline the contest. But, in truth, the picture was no more to him, at that moment, than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the grandson, here present, as his two immediate ancestors.

Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died for it? Might not this influence be the same that was called witch-craft? At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the air, the carpenter made a gesture, as if directing downward a slow, ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden.

Pyncheon, stepping forward. Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge it. And was it not for her sake, far more than his own, that he desired its success? Clifford Pyncheon The nephew of the deceased bachelor Jaffrey Pyncheon, whose death by natural causes Clifford is unjustly blamed for — through the machinations of his cousin Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. Following a thirty-year imprisonment, Clifford is released and begins to live with his spinster sister, Hepzibah Pyncheon; he retains his love of beauty even though his faculties are ruined; he is tenderly cared for by Hepzibah and Phoebe.

Phoebe Pyncheon The seventeen-year-old country cousin of Hepzibah, Clifford, and Judge Jaffrey; she is lovely and sunny, but intellectually shallow. She marries Holgrave at the end of the novel.

Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon The hypocritical, smiling villain who causes his cousin Clifford's imprisonment and tortures him in an effort to locate missing evidence of Pyncheon family rights to Indian lands; he dies alone in the parlor of the House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave The twenty-one-year-old daguerreotypist photographer who rooms in the seven-gabled Pyncheon house; he resists using his hypnotic powers on Phoebe Pyncheon whom he ultimately marries ; he has radical notions, but, ironically, he becomes conservative.