The Cover Story: How a Firing and a Funeral Made The Scarlet Letter

Most readers who pick up The Scarlet Letter want to get to Hester, and they are not always sure what to do with the forty pages that come first, a long, dry, faintly cranky essay about a customs house in Salem where nothing much happens. Megan Marshall, in her Rebind commentary, makes the case that those pages are the foundation the novel could not have stood without, and the story of how they came to be written is a story of a man losing almost everything in a single year.

The year was 1849, and Nathaniel Hawthorne was in trouble, in that he had spent more than a decade in obscurity, and Marshall sketches the long apprenticeship plainly: a first novel he hated so much he burned every copy he could find, then "12 years of his life" living in his family's Salem house, "writing stories and throwing them away," wandering the countryside every summer. The job at the Salem Custom House had finally given him a steady income. Then the political winds shifted, the appointment evaporated, and Hawthorne was out. "It was a political appointment. He got the boot," Marshall says. "And this led to his writing of the Scarlet Letter, a desperate attempt to write something that would make some money."

The Grief That Went into the Story

The firing was only half of it, Marshall explains: "At the same time, his mother died." Hawthorne and his mother had never been close, by his own account, keeping what he called a margin of silence between them their whole lives. But when she died in the house where they were living, something broke open. Marshall quotes his own astonished record of it: he collapsed in sobs as he had never done before and never did since. "And that went into this story of the Scarlet Letter," Marshall says. A man fired from his job, grieving a mother he had never managed to reach, sat down and wrote a novel about guilt, concealment, and the buried past in a matter of months.

A National Scandal, Deliberately Fanned

The Custom-House preface, then, is Hawthorne accounting for himself before he dares to tell Hester's story, and Marshall reads it as a shrewd piece of work disguised as a complaint. The firing had become a minor national scandal. "The whole controversy around his firing from the Custom House had become a kind of national incident," she says. People in Congress were fighting about it. By opening his novel with a preface that picks at that live controversy, Hawthorne guaranteed attention. "More people read the book and more people reviewed the book and more people knew about the book," Marshall says. The mild-mannered author who insisted he was not political was, in fact, fanning a political fire he knew would sell copies.

Fiction Dressed as Discovery

But the preface does something more important than generate buzz, and this is the part Marshall most wants readers to see. It establishes a claim of truth. Hawthorne invents a frame: up in the unused rooms of the Custom House, he says, he found a bundle of old papers wrapped around a faded scrap of red cloth in the shape of a letter A, along with the records of a real former surveyor named Pue. The whole apparatus is fiction dressed as discovery. "Did Surveyor Pue really bundle up a bunch of manuscripts around a Scarlet Letter? You can believe that or not," Marshall says, "but it's important for Hawthorne to establish a truthiness, we might say, to his fiction." The cover story is the point. By claiming he merely found Hester's story, Hawthorne grants himself the authority to tell it.

Marshall, who has spent her own career building books out of exactly this kind of material, reads the move with a craftsman's appreciation. "A story that comes out of a manuscript, a document, a letter," she says. "I love the notion of finding a story from the past." Hawthorne is doing in fiction what the biographer does in fact, persuading the reader that what follows is recovered rather than invented, that the past has been opened rather than imagined. She points to the phrase Hawthorne keeps circling, the effect of truth, "the livelier effect of truth," and notes that the whole preface exists to manufacture it.

The Slow Arc Henry James Learned

There is a structural payoff that Marshall, a careful reader of Henry James, especially admires. The preface seems to meander, to delay, to make you wonder why you are reading about a customs house at all. Then the letter appears and the book snaps into focus. "We're kind of like, gosh, what's happening here? Is this even a novel? Is this a story? Why are we reading this? And then, whoa, this letter." James learned that slow-building arc from Hawthorne, Marshall notes, the technique of starting almost imperceptibly and then revealing, late, that you were inside a novel the whole time.

So the forty pages are not throat-clearing. They are the load-bearing wall. A fired surveyor, a mother freshly in the ground, a desperate need for money, and a writer's decision to disguise his invention as a discovery, all of it had to come first so that the story of Hester Prynne could arrive with the weight of something true. Hawthorne stakes his claim to her story by first accounting for his own ruin. The Custom-House is the price of admission he pays before he is allowed through the door, and Marshall's reading is that he knew exactly what he was doing when he made the reader pay it too.