 Today, we'll examine Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which as I said before is a kind of powerful rejection of Amazonianism. I'm going to talk a bit about the Puritan elements in the novel. Hawthorne was actually an expert on the Puritan history of America. His many tales on that period are based on study of many documents, many books that we can easily see him referencing or that he had borrowed and read. But as I say, this rejection of Amazonianism is, I think, the harder part to see at first. Once you begin to see it, you realize how powerful it is. Hawthorne was a friend of Emerson's. He may even for a while have been influenced by the older man's powerful mind and rhetoric. But he broke away decisively from this kind of thinking. And in breaking away, I'm not worried to convey to you the idea of a personal quarrel of any sort between two important writers. They never really did quarrel. It's just that Hawthorne saw with swiftness and terrifying clarity what the implications of Emerson's transcendentalism really were for the development of America and how deeply America had already absorbed far too many romantic notions of the God-like individual. So we'll talk mostly about the Custom House through Chapter 5. And perhaps you can envision Old Salem Port, where the Custom House introduction begins. I was very busy port at the time, lovely in many ways, but full of great ships, full of cargo coming in, being loaded and unloaded. And Hawthorne was there to examine it and to collect taxes for the U.S. government. So when he begins with the Custom House, he is talking about a tax house, a house where taxes are collected, where licenses were given, where the business of the federal government was conducted. But he calls it the Custom House with a pun quite intended. It's very beautiful brick federalist kind of architecture. You go in it today and it's quite lovely. But Hawthorne is also saying that custom is very important for a nation, that the past never really dies. It moves onward into bones and sinews and ideas of its people. And it should, because if you lose the wrong elements of your past, you will lose what has nourished what is best in your culture. I'm going to go relatively quickly through the basic themes of the Custom House. And I hope you'll see that as we go on through the novel, that what Hawthorne is really doing is almost like a symphony. He's introducing basic themes that he will return to again and again in the novel itself. And the first is the power of custom among men. Because revolutions and new nations can only be as new as human being. But human being is very old and the customs of men are very old. And unfortunately, one of the customs is to do evil. Just as fortunately one of the customs is to love the good. These are not customs we necessarily, you know, that they don't begin in custom. They begin in the great horror. They begin first in creation and then become marred in the great horror of the fall. But they are always with us. And as much as America wanted to think of itself as a new nation, completely unlike Europe and Europeans and so much better than everybody else, Hawthorne knows we're still the same old sinful folks we always were. He tells us, for example, that government preference in the US is based on friendship and usefulness to persons more than on any objective qualification. Not entirely bad, but it can lead to sloth. It can lead to taking money for doing nothing. He tells us that one of the customs among men is to be a one who lives only for the flesh. And, you know, the next meal and the next sleep, the next drink, no matter how great the history they may dwell among, Hawthorne did think the history of America was great. He also tells us that a new bloodthirstiness has arisen in his day among what we call the Jacksonian Americans. He makes all those guillotine jokes, doesn't he, about his being fired because Jackson said sweep them all out and replace them with men who supported me. And he thinks of this as a kind of ugliness in America that had not existed before. And to a large degree it hadn't. He sees a vanishing civility and kindness in the Jacksonian America. And he talks about himself as the headless surveyor. He talks about the un-gentle eagle. And if you've ever seen that picture of the eagle on top of the custom house, he really does look pretty ferocious with his bundle of arrows in his hand and even though he's offering the olive branch and the other. A second great theme of Hawthorne here is that the past indeed lives in all people. It may become vague and misty in our minds, but it's never really dead. Even if you've never been taught it, which unfortunately is the pattern of modern American education, and two, it's always, always, always more complex than we make it out to be. He tells us, be careful how you measure your forefathers. General Miller, who is one of the denizens of the custom house, loves flowers and spends lots of time nowadays taking care of them. But he was absolutely capable of leading slaughter in the American Revolution. And he wants to tell us that the past is never complete and gone. He tells us about going up into the unfinished attic of the custom house. And it is fascinating up there how empty and, you know, so much of the stuff he describes as lying around is, of course, now not there. But it's a sense of infinite capacity, infinite resource for what is to come. Like that unfinished upper story, it's a treasury of resources that will shape the future. Your past, and not just yours, of course, the past of the West, will shape your future. That's why you're busy involving yourself with liberal education, because it gives you the best of the past, so that you may use it to build the future. He tells us that every past time, no matter how far past, is already deeply related to its own past. You have to be very careful about reading something as if, well, it just sort of came into being. No, it didn't, except for Adam and Eve. But after that, Plato has forebearers. He has people who think before him, who talk before him, who have created Athens before him. So we have this wonderful figure of Jonathan Pugh, his majesty's surveyor. His figure long dead, he actually, you know, he was a surveyor under the king. And he investigates his past, which is the past of the earlier Puritan settlers, to assemble the dossier, the embroidered A, and all the different documents about this scarlet letter. And then, the surveyor for the United States, which of course did not even exist when Jonathan Pugh was serving his Britannic majesty, uses that assembled past in order to explain our own day.