As I read “The Custom-House” and the assigned pages of The Scarlet Letter, I found myself intrigued by the motif of “soil” as symbolic of ancestry, death versus rebirth, purity versus sin, etc. Hawthorne first introduces soil imagery in “The Custom-House” when he suggests a mystical relationship between the individual and the place where his ancestors’ “deep and aged roots…struck into the soil,” and specifically describes his own experience of “attachment” to Salem, where his own ancestor, William Hathorne, “mingled their earthy substance with the soil” (429). For Hawthorne, “the spell survives” through generations. This is not necessarily an original or even remarkable metaphor on its own, but Hawthorne extends it a few pages later: Hawthorne suggests that his ancestor, William Hathorne’s, “hard severity” and “persecuting spirit” in some way diseased the “old trunk of the family tree” (430). He concludes this metaphor by contending that although he finds himself drawn to this “natal soil,” “the connection” is “an unhealthy one,” and that “human nature will not flourish…if it be planted and replanted…in the same worn-out soil” (431). 

I recalled this passage when the soil imagery reappeared in chapter five of The Scarlet Letter. Here, Hawthorne ponders Hester’s decision to remain in Salem despite her ostracization from the rest of the pilgrims, stewing in her shameful reputation. He suggests that some “force of doom” binds her to the city, as “her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had stuck into the soil” (469). This parallels, strangely, the notion of Hawthorne’s ancestor, William, lodging his own family tree into Salem’s history through the cruel deeds of his lifetime. Hawthorne seems to believe that this casts some sort of strange spell on the future generations (ironic given the Salem Witch Trials), condemning them to a life of bondage to the “natal earth” (431) if they cannot somehow atone for the ancestors’ unresolved sins. Has Hester’s adultery subjected her daughter, Pearl, to some “ghost-like” (469) manifestation of her sin that chains them to Salem, pending some repentance? Could this “evil spirit [that] possessed the child” (478) possibly be unrelated to the “mystic shadow” (470) attached to the isolated dwelling of Hester and Pearl? What’s more striking is Hawthorne’s characterization of their house, whose surrounding “soil…was too sterile for cultivation” (470). I cannot consider this detail independent of Hawthorne’s metaphor in “The Custom-House” that suggests that “human nature will not flourish” in “worn-out soil,” and that the later generations should move elsewhere despite their pull to this “soil” (cited above). So what does all this mean? How does this connect to the rose bush near the prison referenced in the beginning of the novel, or to Governor Bellingham’s vegetable garden that will never achieve “the native English taste for ornamental gardening” (484)? Could this recurring “mystical soil” allude to a commentary on the history of Salem and its English, Puritan pilgims – perhaps even to its service as “poisoned soil” in which the later Salem Witch Trials “took root?”