Once was considered vaguely introductory and irrelevant Now considered essential to understanding the novel. Accomplishes two things: Dramatizes the author’s own vocational struggle as an imaginative writer in a profession scorned by his Puritan ancestors it also connects analogously with the novel that follows

Vocational struggle as a professional writer : carried out in the dust-ridden custom house sees CH as a land of the dead, a society dominated by the past, one that disdains an idle life devoted to fiction One that only wants to honor commercial success; not to make money = existing without honor, status, or vocation

(2 ) The story of Nathaniel Hawthorne among these people in the 19 th C is clearly linked by analogy with that of Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl in the 17 th C. Both the CH and the town of Salem are places of sterility, emptiness, shadows; places of the living dead Also, the general life of the community is dead The most famous historical site is a place of death: Gallows Hill, where they hanged the 'witches' in the seventeenth century. Finally, the Custom House itself is dead

Not only is the town a place of decay and death; The people who inhabit it are all but dead themselves: The narrator comes to see that his own life is influenced and shadowed by the dead: his own ancestors Regards them with both shame and pride. They were among the cruelest of the Puritans, especially in their harsh treatment of the Quaker women and the Salem 'witches'.

Elements of death contrasted with the prospect of creativity in his imagination—his vocation as a writer He gives up his literary creativity (which is his rightful vocational 'life') when he leaves Concord and his literary friends to make money in Salem.

In 'The Custom-House' he looks back with something like nostalgia to that former life, and he yearns to have a creative, imaginative life again. It is not until he is fired (which he compares to being beheaded), and so thrown out of the land of the dead, that he is able to resurrect himself as a human being and writer of fiction.

Finally, in the last paragraph, he contemplates this fully restored life— He replaces the death image of Gallows Hill, where the witches were hanged, with the life-giving and renewing image of the town pump, which he believes he has made famous in one of his sketches by that name. Therefore, the Custom House illustrates the author’s spiritual suffocation in a stifling environment

Other ways CH connects with the novel: Both worlds controlled by age where youth and creativity stifled Main connection: Narrator climbs into the attic, guided by the ghost of the former surveyor, finds the ragged scarlet letter, along with Hester Prynne’s story.

Places faded letter on his breast & feels it burn Importance of this: Narrator feels same inward fire that stirred in Hester Metaphorically, he “wears” a scarlet letter of his own. He, like Hester, is a creator, an artist, the kind of person scorned by societies of rigid and immovable old men

Both these accounts, especially as they involve the narrator and Hester, are stories of survival. While Hester suffers intensely, suppressing her passionate nature, losing her faith, and becoming in many ways deluded about herself and her situation, she is still able to survive….

The narrator of 'The Custom-House,' however, seems troubled by his inability to survive in Salem, this nineteenth-century land of the dead… The narrator's denial of his past vocation as a creative writer & pretense that he is only an editor of The Scarlet Letter link him inevitably with a main character in SL, who also attempts to deny his creative nature by denying that he is Pearl's father.

But… while this character consciously seeks to be something more than human in trying to simulate sainthood, the narrator of CH is terrified that he will become less than human….

Also… similarity between this character’s mounting the scaffold at the end of SL… …and the narrator's imaginary ascent to the Custom House attic to decide that he will write the story of Hester Prynne, reclaiming his own true relationship to his art.

Another comparison between the two is the parallel between the narrator of CH and the villain of SL Both use a “black art” For the CH narrator, he publicly ridicules the town of Salem & the man who worked in the CH & got him fired Cited from: