In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne`s desire to connect his narrative with history is first shown by the time frame he uses. When Hawthorne chose to write about seventeenth-century Boston, it was a community that recognized no clear line between the real world and what we might call fairyland. His explicit aim in this novel is that the $quot;Actual$quot; and the $quot;Imaginary$quot; may meet and reality and fiction can coexist. Hawthorne pretends to borrow his nan active`s authority by attributing its origin to a historical document. The implications of the narrator`s finding the scarlet letter in $quot;The Custom-House$quot; sketch are of considerable importance to the narrative. The symbolic status of the letter `A` begins to have a variety of meanings by the narrator`s emphasizing its literal existence. As the tone of $quot;The Custom-House$quot; begins to define the content of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne becomes a character in that romance, and his voice echoes throughout the book with its complication of tones. Hawthorne means us to hear his voice about the most American radical woman. We finally meet Hester to be transformed into an agent of social cohesion after Dimmesdale`s metamorphosis, from secret rebel into public prophet. 1fie reason of Nester`s final conversion to the letter A is not directly stated, but it is clearly deliberate on Hawthorne`s part. In effect, Hawthorne invites us to participate in a free and voluntary symbol making. It is in this sense that no longer is the reader of The Scarlet Letter the passive recipient of those ideas that the author has planted in his text. For Hawthorne, the strongest reality of passion or guilt seems to be in the past, especially the history of New England. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne attempts to destroy our established conceptions of what history and fiction are, which suggests that our own reading of the novel is also historically determined. In the end, we can surely call Hawthorne one of the most historically-minded writers in America.