2

Highly legitimate as it is, duly warranted by textual evidence, as well as long overdue, the new critical emphasis on the “return” of Hester at the end of The Scarlet Letter might be felt somehow to underplay those “wild” moments that still largely account for the novel’s lingering appeal. There might be a way, though, of integrating those episodes of exposure back into the overall scheme, by considering them as dialectical stages in the process of the American “errand into the wilderness.”