ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that text and context are reciprocal: that to understand The Scarlet Letter in its own terms to bring into view the enormous imaginative resources of mid-nineteenth-century American liberalism. “The scarlet letter had not done its office”: the entire novel asks us to interpret this ideologically, in the affirmative, and by the end it compels us to, as a grim necessity. The repressed letters can be taken as one sign of a strain in his method. Another was his wife Sophias splitting headache after he read the last chapter aloud to her. Hawthornes Mayflower has all the major imaginative ingredients of the dominant culture: the legend of the Puritan theocracy, womb of American democracy; the ambiguities of good and evil, agency of compromise; and the ironies of regeneration through violence, rationale for civil war. The return of the Mayflower is a parable of social conflict following upon cultural myth.
