Selfhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne`s The Scarlet Letter

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The nineteenth-century romance tradition in American literature explicitly shows the making of selfhood in the history of American literature and thought. However, the critical perspective on the formation of American self, primarily generated by Sacvan Bercovitch, has come to face the charges of its critical limitations. For instance, it is said that Bercovitch has interest in rhetoric, specially the rhetoric of the Puritanism, rather than in socio-economic and political context.

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The nineteenth-century romance tradition in American literature explicitly shows the making of selfhood in the history of American literature and thought. However, the critical perspective on the formation of American self, primarily generated by Sacvan Bercovitch, has come to face the charges of its critical limitations. For instance, it is said that Bercovitch has interest in rhetoric, specially the rhetoric of the Puritanism, rather than in socio-economic and political context.
Bercovitch`s approach, as Reising observes, has not only exposed the rhetoric and mystification of American identity as "a nearly impervious ideological vehicle assuring a powerful consensus within the confines of middle-class American political hegemony" but also reinforced the shaping of somewhat one-sided, if not false, "American ideology", dealing with the canon of so-called classic American romances (Unusable 83). This shaping of one-dimensional literary tradition has been manipulated by "a small group of north-eastern male WASPs", as Clark names in his "American Romance" (581), who have grasped the hegemony in the literary criticism of American literature. For the activity of criticism itself is in a sense the process of consensus which is permeated by what is called American ideology.

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