Named source · 1851

The House of the Seven Gables Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Context & Meanings

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For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

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“For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Meaning & context

Hawthorne’s narrator turns imprisonment inward, suggesting that guilt, memory and self-judgment can confine a person more relentlessly than an external cell.

Source details

The House of the Seven Gables, Project Gutenberg #77. This is Gothic literary narration surrounding Clifford’s long history of confinement and inner suffering; the metaphor is not a clinical account of mental illness.

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