1. The House of Seven Gables By Nathaniel Hawthorne “We might say that there was enough of splendid rubbish in his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtle conscience than the Judge was ever troubled with”

2. Theme  Judge Pyncheon projects a good identity of himself to the public, and inadvertently loses his own true identity.

3. Literary Elements  Rhetorical question  Juxtaposition  Periodic sentence  Irony  Parallelism  Antithesis

4. Juxtaposition  Line 4: “…there was enough splendid rubbish in his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtle conscience than the Judge was troubled with”  Contrasting ideas

5. Parallel structure  Line 7-36: “The purity of his judicial character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service in subsequent capacities…”  Makes deeds insignificant.

6. Irony  Line 18-21: “…the severity with which he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour the young man’s life…”  Good language about a bad thing.

7. More Irony!  Line 22-25: “…his efforts in the furtherance of the temperance-cause’ his confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal glasses of old Sherry wine…”  Hypocritical.

8. Periodic  Line 42-50: “And, allow that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless youth, he had committed some one wrong act…let it overshadow the fair aspect of a lifetime”  He has to have a good public image.

9. Rhetorical Question  Line 50-53: “What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb’s bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into he other scale!”  Judge Pyncheon cannot show his true self in public.

10. Antithesis  Line 54-60: “…seldom or never looking inward, and resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his image, as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive at true self- knowledge, except through loss of property and reputation.”  Should be looking inward, but he is taking his image from the public opinion. The only way to find himself is lose his reputation.

11. Exclamation/ Cryptic sentence  Lines 60-61: “Sickness will not always help him to it; not always the death-hour!”  Most people reflect on their lives when they’re about to die.  The exclamation puts emphasis on how lost Judge Pyncheon is.

12. How I can relate  As teenagers, we all have a little Judge Pyncheon in ourselves We often care too much about public opinion and what our friends think, instead of what we really value.