A curse hangs over the Pyncheon family, dating back to the Salem witch trials, and the house itself seems to embody centuries of guilt. Hawthorne wrote this the year after The Scarlet Letter, in a burst of productivity, and it is a ghost story that is also a meditation on inherited sin, on how the past haunts the present. The daguerreotypist Holgrave brings new technology and new democratic ideals into the decaying mansion. Hawthorne's prose is dense with shadows and symbolic furniture. The novel ends more hopefully than his others, though the hope feels fragile. The gables still stand; the curse may only be sleeping.