The Marraige of Maule & Pyncheon

[Mark Kohut]

	* In Defense of Reason - Google Books Result
Yuor Winters- 2007 - Philosophy - 628 pages
MAULE'S CURSE or Hawthorne and the Problem of Allegory "At the moment of 
execution— with the halter about his neck and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=1406711519...
	* Amazon.com: Maule's Curse Seven Studies in the History of American ...



----- Original Message ----
From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Fri, September 3, 2010 10:09:11 PM
Subject: Re: The Marraige of Maule & Pyncheon (Pynchon's mesmeric process)

We doubt research into Pynchon & Co. and the family heretics will produce 
anything more than shades of gray. Pynchon, like Hawthorne, uses biographical 
and historical material, not to write biography or history, or even 
autobiography, but romance. 


We might consider how the romance, HSG, influenced Pynchon. How does the 
marriage work? Photography? The mirror? Is Pynchon now, mingled with Maule, 
looking into the mirror, the Evil Genius?  


We have already hinted, that it is not our purpose to trace down the history of 
the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the House of the Seven 
Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the rustiness and infirmity of 
age gathered over the venerable house itself. As regards its interior life, a 
large, dim looking-glass used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to 
contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there, -- 
the old colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique 
babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or saddened 
with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that mirror, we would 
gladly sit down before it, and transfer its revelations to our page. But there 
was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the 
posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the 
looking-glass, and that, by what
appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner 
region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves 
to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again 
some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular 
imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan 
Pyncheon and the wizard Maule; the curse, which the latter flung from his 
scaffold, was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a 
part of the Pyncheon inheritance.

To the thoughtful mind, there will be no tinge of superstition in what we 
figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor -- 
perhaps as a portion of his own punishment -- is often doomed to become the Evil 
Genius of his family.