In the passage from The Custom House, Hawthorne poetically describes the active abandonment of his home town Salem, whose past is riddled with tragedy and shame. He accomplishes creating a dramatic scene through his assumptions based on the townspeople’s actions and elaborating upon them by adding imagery. “Scorned, as she is now by her own merchants and shipowners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin.” To Hawthorne this is nothing but a purely factual description of his soon to be decrepit home that he feels the need to share with the reader in order to fully elaborate and develop the…
