American fiction.

Academic year 2021-22

Prof. Luisa Juárez Hervás

Lesson 2. Reading questions for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom House.”

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Look for a literary biography of this author and write down just
the facts that you consider relevant for our discussion on his writings.

2. Use the following links to become acquainted with the social context in which the
novel was written. You will find plenty of trivia and photographs of Salem.

https://www.salem.org/celebrating-200-years-of-salems-custom-house/
http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/Literature/customhousesketch/Introduction.ht
ml

3. Read “The Custom-House” with pen in hand. If you have purchased the novel, you
may read “The Custom-House” in your own edition. Otherwise, please, read the copy
posted on the platform and underline evidence to answer the following questions. A
good method is to use pens of different colours, but this is obviously up to you.

4. Comment on the narrative strategy of the lost-and-found manuscript. Was it an

authentic discovery? If compared with Irving’s introduction to “Rip,” can you find
similarities and differences? What are they?

5. What does the narrator’s “true purpose” in writing this “The Custom-House” sketch
seem to be? What brought the narrator back to Salem to work in “Uncle Sam’s brick
edifice”? What was his position at the Custom-House? How does such position
contribute to his job as a writer?

6. How does the narrator feel about Old Salem? Find some information about the Salem
trials in colonial times. What happened? What reference is made to the Salem witch
trials in Hawthorne’s text?

7. To what extent would you say is this introduction an autobiographical piece? Please,
use evidence from the text to support your answer.

8. Hawthorne provides a well-known explanation of what the romance is. Find the lines
in the text and comment on them. According to this definition, what is the difference
between a romance and a novel?

9. Please, underline evidence in the text on at least four of the following topics.

• Critique of civil servants and politicians

• The nature of civil authority and its coercive powers
• Echoes of American history and American literature
• Critique of Brook Farm and Transcendentalists
• The impact of isolation on the individual
• The sense of separation experienced by the artist from the rest of society
• Literary fame and livelihood
• The Romance
• Convention of the found manuscript
• Parallelisms between author and novel characters