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Permanent scowl on her face
- Hepzibah Pyncheon is the last in a long line of Pyncheon aristocrats. Hepzibah personifies the pitfalls of this aristocracy, both financially, as evidenced by her having to open and tend a shop, and spiritually, as shown by the permanent scowl on her face.
www.sparknotes.com/lit/sevengables/character/hepzibah-pyncheon/The House of the Seven Gables Hepzibah Pyncheon - SparkNotes
Where Judge Pyncheon's most recognizable characteristic is his kindly smile, Hepzibah's is her dark scowl. She doesn't mean to scowl; it's just that she's near-sighted and has heavy eyebrows. She has to squint all the time, which makes her look angry.
Hepzibah is the member of the Pyncheon family who currently resides in the House of the Seven Gables, having lived as a near-recluse there for the past quarter-century. Hepzibah grew up thinking of herself as a member of the aristocracy even as the family’s fortunes declined.
Poor Hepzibah's dark, near-sighted scowl is the counterpart of the dark-browed house itself, and her scowl is both the cause and the effect of her isolation from society. Frail, gray-haired, and garbed in black rusty silk dresses, Hepzibah is sustained by "fantasies of the old time" and by a strong, passionate love for her brother.
Clifford eats his food ravenously, but he cannot look his sister in the face and keeps casting his eyes around so that he does not have to look at the ugliness of Hepzibah’s scowl. After breakfast, Clifford begins to look around the room.
She dresses in black and wears a turban. She appears to have a permanent scowl on her face, but it is due to squinting to compensate for her poor vision, not an indicator of a bad temper. Despite her reclusive state and humble nature, Hepzibah is the protagonist of The House of Seven Gables.
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Face to face with this picture, on entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause; regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow, which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and ill-will.
