ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to approach Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece through “The Old Manse” and “The Custom House,” the two great prefaces he wrote. In terms of actual composition, Hawthorne ends “The Old Manse” with the announcement that he is entering a Custom House, lamenting as he does so his failure to find an imaginative treasure in the Old Manse. Hawthorne’s awareness that he is bringing to light something which the history he approves had lodged in the Custom House makes him need the moral not only as a protection against charges of subversion but also as a reality which both causes and justifies the tale. The emblem precedes and causes experience, just as art is itself the cause of experience for Hawthorne. For if Hawthorne feels a bond of sympathy for the past, he feels one also for the present. Despite the satiric impulse Hawthorne directs toward the gallery of customs officers he sketches, there is one figure he unmistakably admires.
