Surveyors in American Romance (The Custom House of Hawthorne)

[Dave Williams]

Hawthorne also played with established conventions. In "The Custom-House," the preface to The Scarlet Letter (1850), the relation of the actual to the imaginary is taken under consideration in a characteristically Romantic manner: as both form and content. Although prefaces usually function as part of the proscenium or narrative frame, setting off what follows as "just pretend," it is quickly apparent that Hawthorne's preface is a fiction all its own. Specifically, it is the story of how Hawthorne came to write the tale of Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter, but by the end the narrator of the preface has been transformed from Nathaniel Hawthorne, real-life custom surveyor victimized by his political enemies, to a purely fictive and highly creative imaginative voice. Instead of providing a factual ground for the fiction which follows, the facts of the sketch themselves thus become fictions, allowing Hawthorne to explore one of the fundamental components
 of the literary transaction: the relationships among authors and readers, fact and fiction. The preface makes clear that for Hawthorne, romance involves experimentation, play, metafictional allusion, and narrative gamesmanship.

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