A Shift Away From the Gothic

Initially, what makes this passage seem not at all like a Gothic piece compared the excerpt from “Maule’s Well,” is that the scenery described here has none of the grotesque connotation that has been portrayed in that part, but as well as the rest of the book. Hawthorne deliberately wants the reader to see the darkness that the characters are living in, and to almost give the reader this sense of fear and foreboding that the characters might feel living in the house. There are just too many positive things that Hawthorne is stating about the kitchen and the house in general for there to be any context of Gothic literature in this opening of chapter seven. For example, when Phoebe is taking in the scent of the house coming from the kitchen, she describes it as such:                             

            If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom, in the mode suggested, it

would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah’s hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have steamed with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges, puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction. (98)

from this description of the initial scent of the house that Phoebe has from her aunt cooking, the description depicts all positive smelling foods, such as “Christmas pies,” and not anything negative like that of mold cheese, or rotten eggs, both of which when describing a kitchen from the Gothic period, may give off the idea that the kitchen smells like a dead body.

In terms of interpreting the Gothic, this shift away from that format of a story, to me, could catch the reader off guard. Everything seems so sweet and happy at this point in the story and it is as if it is prepping for the worse to come, trying to catch the reader off guard by thinking that everything is okay for these two characters in the good-smelling kitchen.