The Office of the Scarlet Letter

In this reprint from 1991 (which has a new preface), Bercovitch (American literature, Harvard U.) analyzes the relationship between the aesthetic and ideological qualities of The Scarlet Letter and its cultural context of mid-nineteenth-century liberal democracy. He considers the novel’s aesthetic design in terms of cultural strategies of control and how the culture reveals itself in the text, focusing on symbolic meanings of the scarlet letter itself. He offers a historical reading of the novel’s unities, then a rhetorical analysis of key mid-nineteenth-century issues in the US and abroad, such as individualism and socialism, focusing on the point at which the scarlet letter does its duty when Hester returns to America. Parts of the book were first presented as lectures at the U. of Massachusetts, Amherst, and published in literary journals. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)