“Then, all was spoken!” What “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter Disclose

Abstract

Twins--fraternal twins and one not fully developed--were delivered into the world of literature on January 15, 1850, the day Nathaniel Hawthorne sent James T. Fields "The Custom-House" and The Scarlet Letter, still shy of its last three chapters. The sketch and the novella had gestated together in Nathaniel's imagination, and, whatever their conspicuous differences in tone, content, and genre, their nearly simultaneous composition measures how closely these texts are related, how deliberately they had been conceived as vehicles for revelation and obfuscation. (1) Though in the sketch Nathaniel discloses some facts about his life among torpid, unproductive employees, his detailed hoax about discovering an embroidered letter "A" in the Custom-House militates against any putative candor. The novella then elaborates upon the depiction of men who have lost their vigor as well as their words. (2) Signifiers of impotence--in its broadest sense--characterize Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale, whose covert connections to Hester Prynne reprise their author's own clandestine courtship with Sophia Peabody. He had forced her to bear a burden of secrecy that he now places upon his fictional heroine. And although Sophia might have seemed entirely removed from the events Nathaniel recounts in "The Custom-House," this absence signals her presence. The Scarlet Letter and, in particular, the scarlet letter further encode Sophia's speech--her artistic media both visual and verbal--which defies patriarchal silencing and usurps male roles. No wonder Nathaniel hoped to "keep the inmost Me behind its veil," even though at this moment he was seized by an "autobiographical impulse" (1:3, 4). The sketch and the novella were written at a moment that demanded Nathaniel's exorcism of personal demons. During the summer of 1849, his mother's death had followed hard upon his dismissal from the Custom-House, bereavement magnifying his already overwhelming sense of loss and deficiency. (3) What Sophia interpreted as liberation--"Oh then you can write your book," her son would claim she had said--Nathaniel experienced as emasculation. Because Nathaniel could not support his family, Sophia earned money for their "bread & butter & rent" by deploying her skills as an artist. During the fall of 1849 and the early winter of 1850, she produced and sold ebony-inlaid hand-screens and extravagantly illustrated booklets. Salem's wealthiest citizens eagerly bought these items for five or ten dollars apiece. So great was their demand for Sophia's work that she was pressed to fill orders for it, and she labored to the point of exhaustion. Even so, the Hawthornes required, and accepted, loans from Sophias wealthy friends Ann Hooper and the philanthropists Sarah and Frank Shaw. As Sarah wrote of her gift of money, "pay it back when you don't want it, here or hereafter, or never...." (4) In "The Custom-House," Nathaniel's criticism of his "coadjutors" as men "who depend for subsistence on charity," even though some are "in their strength and prime, ..." (1:16, 7, 16), clearly rebounds upon himself. By belittling men who wile away the work-day telling "old sea-stories" or repeating "frozen witticisms of past generations" (1:14, 15), Nathaniel belittles himself, a writer of tales about New England's past. But worse, he realizes that not one of these men, among them "merchants and sea-captains"--members of that group to which his father had belonged--"ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me, if they had read them all." Abandoning the autobiographical first person, Nathaniel creates a third person narrator who judges his work to be "utterly devoid of significance," as is all that "he achieves, and all he aims at" (1:10, 26-27). And using another fictional device, Nathaniel invents a conversation with long-dead forebears who grill him: "A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life ... may that be? …