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by donovan reynolds. on January 8th, 2007

donovan reynolds.

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Can someone help me understand what "The Custom House" (it's in the intro to Scarlet Letter) by Nathaniel Hawthorne was about? I've read it 3 or 4 times, and things still aren't processing.

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  • by anonymous on January 9th, 2007

    anonymous

    Bloom's Notes: Scarlet Letter; 1996, p12-21, 10p
    By Neal Dolan, Harvard University

    Thematic Structural Analysis
    The Scarlet Letter begins with a lengthy autobiographical introductory section entitled "The Custom-House." Before launching into the tale itself, Hawthorne (if indeed the narrator of "The Custom-House" is Hawthorne) tells the story of how he came into possession of the materials on which ?Tie Scarlet Letter is based. Three years previously, he tells us, having given up trying to make a living as a writer, he had accepted a political appointment as a "Surveyor of the Revenue" at a custom house (a place where business relating to shipping is conducted) in his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. In wry tones, he describes the custom house as a place worn by the effects of time and boredom. He provides gentle satirical sketches of a variety of decrepit functionaries who pretend to work there, biding their time until the next meal or mechanically recounting stories of more lively former days. He includes himself in his mockery as he regrets the "home-feeling" that ties him to this location of his family's Puritan roots, where the ghosts of his ancestors still cling to him with "oyster-like tenacity." While patiently performing the dry tasks required of him at this dreary site, he finds among heaps of discarded business documents "a certain affair of fine red cloth"--a faded and worn letter "A" made out of scarlet fabric and embroidered around its edges with gold stitching. He holds it to his chest and finds to his surprise that it burns him--"as if the letter were not of red cloth, but of red hot iron." He then unrolls the ancient papers to which the letter had been attached and finds therein the portentous details of the life of Hester Prynne.

    While it is extraneous to the main plot, the "Custom-House" preface establishes a number of the principal thematic concerns in The Scarlet Letter. Primary among these are what one might call the burden of history and, more simply, guilt. By speaking regretfully of his own family's ancient ties to Salem, by sketching a variety of aging local characters all more or less trapped in their youth, by evoking a general atmosphere of moldiness and decay, and by representing his own impulse to write as the response to the command of a deceased historian's ghost, the preface foreshadows the novel's general insistence on the power of the past over the present. The inescapability of the past is one of the most important lessons that Hester, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and the reader will learn over the course of the novel. The emotion of guilt, Hawthorne implies, exists to teach the heart this truth.

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