The Pyncheon In The House Of The Seven Gables

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The Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, also known as The House of the Seven Gables, was built in Salem, Massachusetts in 1668. Based on stories told to him by his second cousin, Susanna Ingersoll, and his own personal visits to the house, author Nathaniel Hawthorne was inspired to write the second of his four major romances (“About the House of Seven Gables.”). In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne uses the Pyncheon’s deteriorating garden to symbolize the family’s decline while simultaneously using Phoebe’s cultivation in the garden to represent her nurturance toward Hepzibah and Clifford. In Chapter 6 of The House of the Seven Gables, Phoebe, after taking a brief tour of the house with Hepzibah, strays into the garden in which “the enclosure