In Chapter 1 and throughout the novel, the narrator personifies the House of the Seven Gables:
On every side the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney.
Elsewhere, the narrator also describes the way the house looks like a face. Here, the house in fact appears to be a "whole sisterhood" of edifices, or building faces. These faces all breathe together "through the spiracles of one great chimney." A spiracle is simply an external opening in a body that is used for breathing, such as a nostril or a gill. The idea that the house breathes through the chimney suggests that it is a living organism that needs air from the outside in order to sustain itself. And yet, as the narrator reveals, the house is rather stifled and cut off from the outside. By personifying the house and emphasizing its need to breathe, the narrator sets up the notion that the house has grown sick from all the years Hepzibah has kept herself locked inside with the ghosts of the family's past.
Furthermore, the idea that the house is not one organism, but a "whole sisterhood" of organisms all breathing together through the same "spiracles," contributes to the sense that all the Pyncheons' and even the Maules' fates are bound up together. Hepzibah must breathe through the same "spiracles" as Colonel Pyncheon once did. The family members are all so obsessed with one other and with their inheritance that their fates become inextricable. It is rather morbid to think of Hepzibah and Colonel Pyncheon being so tightly bound together that they share a nostril; after all, Colonel Pyncheon is long dead. The grotesque merging of all the Pyncheons into one organism contrasts with the healthy interdependence Hepzibah ought to strive for with living community members outside the house. Phoebe, for instance, is a happier person and better shopkeeper than Hepzibah because she knows how to connect with neighbors. Phoebe grows less cheerful and innocent the longer she spends in the house. It is as if the house is taking her deeper into the family's obsession with itself and its own secret history. It is only when the sins of all the dead Pyncheons are brought to light and the deed to the lost Pyncheon inheritance is recovered that Phoebe is saved from the same fate as Hepzibah. Rather than becoming one more part of the organism that must breathe together through the gummed up "spiracle" of the chimney, Phoebe gets to benefit from generational wealth without becoming so obsessed with it that she is cut off from the rest of the world.
In Chapter 17, Clifford uses personification to come up with a metaphor to describe the newly electrified world:
[B]y means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!
Clifford is awed by the technological advances that have been made while he has been in prison. He has spent much of the industrial age locked away: the world looks very different than it did when he was young. He has been marveling over the railroad, but the railroad was not electrified until the end of the 19th century (it ran on steam before this). Rather, as the man he is talking to guesses, Clifford seems to be referring to the recent invention of the telegraph. This new invention facilitated the rapid transmission of information across vast distances. Through the telegraph, Clifford imagines, the world becomes one "great nerve" along which data can travel. He nuances his point by imagining that it is the telegraph lines that constitute the nerve, and that the globe is in fact "a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence." This personification of the globe still does not quite capture the point he is trying to make. He goes on to claim that the electrified globe has in fact surpassed the form of the human brain, becoming abstract thought that has no "substance" at all. Clifford does not mean that the thought is meaningless. Rather, he means that the world is no longer a material thing bound by the laws of physics. Thought can move from one part of the world to the next in what seems like less than an instant. Whereas the transmission of thought used to be bound by the speed with which human bodies could carry it from one place to the next, the world now seems to be thinking independent of these physical limitations.
Of course, Clifford is not exactly correct. Even today, when information travels much, much faster than it did in the mid-19th century, the transmission of information can only happen as quickly as physics allow. Humans have simply continued to invent technologies that take advantage of the laws of physics to move information faster and faster. But at the time Hawthorne was writing, it was marvelous and novel to imagine that the transmission of information could be unbound from the physical limitations of the human body to carry ideas or letters from one place to the next. Clifford uses personification to articulate the way the electrified world first takes the place of human messengers and then surpasses even their capabilities.
