LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2010 final exam—Answers to Question A2

Amber Criswell

The Non-Existence of Closure in Literature

Three thieves each steal a loaf of bread; one thief steals because he refuses to work, one thief steals because he is unable to work and hungry, the last to feed his family, do they both deserve the same punishment?”

          Simple hypothetical situations like the one posed above evidently do not have a clear and fair answer. The moral absolutist would say that all three men did the same crime and should have the same punishment. The moral relativist would agree that two out of the three men were hungry and compromised and do not deserve a harsher punishment than the first. Perhaps in a more ancient time, the moral absolutism ideology would correspond with an appropriate justice system, but that is no longer the case. It is clear that such matters are not black and white and require a certain balance of passivity and rigidness; but this type of balance is difficult to comprehend and administer in actual situations. One role of the morally aware writers of the American Renaissance period in literature is that of a great communicator for the different facets of a morally complex dilemma.

          Two figures from the American Renaissance era that captured the spirit of the times, and need for understanding, were Nathanial Hawthorne and Abraham Lincoln. Nathanial Hawthorne was raised in a God-fearing household and understood the grey areas of religion, often expressing that religious ambiguity as a major theme in his short stories and novels. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, saw a nation that was going through a grand difficulty, and understood that the Union would be completely ripped apart based upon a difference of moral opinion, and chose to find a middle ground. He expresses his beliefs in many of his speeches after the beginning of the Civil War. Both men recognized the growing desire in the people of their generation to break out of the mold of either absolutism or relativism, because there was no going back to the seemingly easier time before them; with Lincoln, they wanted decisions to be made, but the right one; with Hawthorne, they wanted to flaws of the human experience to mesh with religion, not counter it.

          Lincoln was an intellectual and quick-witted man, who bore the burden of an entire nation upon his gaunt shoulders. While he might have seemed like an ill-fitted hero in a time of war, it was his rational mind that saved a country. Lincoln understood the complexities that surrounded a civil war. He was clear at stating that he did not particularly place a fervent amount of blame upon the South, but that they had a different set of practices of the North was conflicting. While in his second inaugural address, he spoke these words to the nation at war:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

It is evident throughout Lincoln’s speech that he desires to keep the peace, and does not mention anything about guilt or innocence in context to the war. He focuses on the recovery, not punishment. Lincoln understood the moral complications that surrounded slavery, a split in the union, and the lives that were going to be lost. At the same time, Lincoln also knew that solely focusing on these issues was not going to move the country in the direction it needed to go in order to secure the union as a whole unit again.

          Nathanial Hawthorne crafted stories that explored the aspects of religion and religious persecution were neither right nor wrong. There was rarely a short story or novel that was written by Hawthorne that did not possess a religious overtone, and often time those stories dealt with the dark side of moral absoluteness that occurred through religion. In his short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil” he discusses the sins that are commonly shared among man, neither condemning them nor praising them, through the symbol of the black veil:

“Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! On every visage a Black Veil!''

Hawthorne describes the short story as a parable, which means that it holds a lesson of some sort. The meaning behind the black veil is that the minister has physically created that same concealment that all people have within their hearts as they are separated from others and God by their personal sins. Hawthorne neither glorifies nor abhors this predicament in his story, but rather discusses the issue with a objectivity that presents a proper moral dilemma in way that does not let the reader easily decide what is right and what is wrong about the characters and their actions.

          Studying this type of literature, whether you study the speeches of Lincoln or read a book by Hawthorne, you are studying masters of perspective. Both authors understand and embrace the challenge of looking at moral issues from all grounds, and not keeping themselves within the box of oversimplification. It is a reward to study this type of literature, but is challenging. Students of literature soon discover that closure does not exist in the realm of books and speeches; different ideas ebb and flow through stories and completely understanding the context of a piece of literature is nearly impossible. This is definitely the case when studying complex moral issues, as intrinsic to their nature is their confusing and unanswerable questions. The amount of critical thinking it takes to comprehend and come to a good decision about the events within a novel, such as The Scarlet Letter, will never prove too definitive, but with learning, it is not what you learn but how you learned it.