ABSTRACT
“[H]e found in the connection between liberal and Puritan hermeneutics his own richest access to the ironies of American history.” 1 Sacvan Bercovitch is describing Nathaniel Hawthorne here but he is also describing himself. He has anatomized that hermeneutic connection such that the American body politic and the cultural mind that makes it move are exposed, as if we were simultaneously reading some DSMIV of the United States while waiting in a doctor’s office papered with posters of the country’s innards. Others might give their account of what Bercovitch calls the “American ideology” and might conceivably do so with something approaching his range of learning and his clarity of description. What is unlikely to be matched by others is how such range and clarity compel us to see that “[i]rony is the key to the historical contrasts and continuities involved.” 2
