The Analysis of Light and Dark Imagery Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, uses many qualities of symbolism which help develop the novel’s main ideas. Darkness is the emblematic “color” of the Pyncheon’s. Contrasted with its opposite, light, it forms one of the major symbols of the novel: the opposition of dark and light. Hawthorne uses dark imagery throughout his novel to express a sense of decay, but he also uses light imagery to inject hope. Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables describes Phoebe as “an illuminating speck of lig