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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Defunct Nightmare:
In Chapter 16, Hawthorne uses a simile to describe the figure of the newly-deceased Judge Pyncheon, slumped in the chair in the House of the Seven Gables:
The brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!
Hawthorne compares Judge Pyncheon to "a defunct nightmare" that has died and "left its flabby corpse on the breast" of the person who was dreaming. Nightmares were often depicted in art and literature at this time as demons called incubi and succubi. An incubus was a male demon that would try to have sex with a sleeping woman; a succubus was essentially the gender-swapped version of an incubus. In 1781, John Henry Fuseli painted a very famous depiction of an incubus sitting directly on a woman's chest while she either slept or swooned. Her head dangles off the edge of the bed, and she looks helpless to move the incubus off of her. Meanwhile, a mare (a "nightmare") peeks around the edge of the bed's curtains, watching the entire scene. The painting, "The Nightmare," made especially popular the image of an incubus or succubus that sits on top of someone's chest while they have bad dreams.
Hawthorne is not necessarily alluding directly to the painting, but this general image seems to be what he has in mind. Judge Pyncheon is the incubus, except that he has died while haunting the inhabitants of the House of the Seven Gables. Clifford and Hepzibah leave him sitting in the chair. Although they are momentarily free from his torment, someone is still going to have to remove his corpse from the ancestral chair before the house and the two families who belong to it will truly be able to shrug off the effects of the "defunct nightmare" Judge Pyncheon embodies.
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