How have American writers critiqued the idea of American Exceptionalism?

               "Be true!  Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"(p. 224).  So says Nathaniel Hawthorne in the conclusion of his romance, The Scarlet Letter.  Over the course of his 183 page work, Hawthorne introduces us to the Puritans of seventeenth-century Boston, who claim to have good conduct, and to be pious, just, and frugal followers of Christ.  However, by the end he manages to knock all of these adjectives out of the Puritan self-definition, replacing them with sinful, hypocritical, and self-righteous.  

               Arthur Dimmesdale, the young minister, is revered by his fellow Puritans, and "enshrined within the stainless sanctity of"(p. 191) the hearts of the blossoming women of society.  However, it is Arthur Dimmesdale who participates in the blackest sin of adultery, and worse, cannot bring himself to confess.  He continues to captivate the congregation, reluctantly loves Hester whom he has made polluted love to, and denies the hand of his own child at "noon-tide"(p.134).   Thus Arthur Dimmesdale, the blessed Reverend, is most sinful and a hypocrite to boot.  

               Puritan Christianity is Christianity nonetheless, a faith centered on forgiveness.  It is therefore hypocritical for the Puritans to enforce Hester's daily torture of the scarlet letter without reprieve.  Even at the end of Dimmesdale's miserable earthly existence, the townspeople "tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame"(p. 214).  It is much more hypocritical that Dimmesdale's revelation of his own scarlet letter is met by the elders with either unbelief or higher reverence, seeing his confession as "a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike"(p. 224).  While Hester is put down day after day, Dimmesdale remains silent and respected until the end, when he is raised up all the higher by his meager demonstration of humility.

               As for frugality, Hawthorne's Puritans are only so in name.  While Pearl, in the golden-red splendor wrought by her mother's artful needlework reminds Governor Bellingham of his "days of vanity" and appears to him a child "of the Lord of Misrule"(p.97), he is much at fault in line of decadence.  He is introduced in chapter 3 wearing "a dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath"(p. 59).  All of 4 chapters later, Hester delivers him a pair of gloves, "fringed and embroidered to his order"(p. 89).  The Puritan elders in chapter 21, altogether now, "deemed it a duty... to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social eminence"(p.201).  The elders are evidently comfortable with wearing luxurious clothing whenever they have a reason to, which is always, due to their rank in society, thus demonstrating their sinfulness and hypocriticalness.  However, it is not only the elders, but the whole town that lies to itself, clothed by Hester's needlework while shaming her with the embroidered letter on her breast.

               While the Puritans follow good conduct, they readily interact with rogue seamen.  The people of society are expected to conform to the law, "But the sea" made no "attempts at regulation by human law" and so the Puritan elders "smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men"(203).  Hawthorne further critiques the Puritan elders in his belief that they would fit right into the British elite, that "the mother country need not have been ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House of Peers, or made the Privy Council of the sovereign"(206).  

               Ultimately, the Puritans are much like the British before them, only more sombre in deportment and more harsh in punishment, which leads to Hawthorne's mighty conclusion that the Puritans of The Scarlet Letter are ungodly, hypocritical and self-righteous, the very opposites of the adjectives they use to describe themselves.