LITR 4232: American
Renaissance
Online Student's Assignments
Hawthorne’s use of Opposites
Hawthorne uses a lot of opposites in his writings, but none of them are completely obvious. There are issues of good (godliness) versus evil, but it is unclear exactly which is the good and which is the evil. It is also unclear on the differences between fantasy and reality. The lines are not clearly drawn between these two states.
Mr. Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” is a man of god. However, the veil covering his face seems to give him a sinister and somewhat evil appearance. The townspeople are all god-fearing people and they like him as a minister, but they all fear the veil, and gossip about it and the possible reasons he wears it. They want him at their bedsides while they are dying, but they do not want him too close because they fear the veil. Even though they are god-fearing people, they are not completely good people because they allow the veil to overshadow their relationship with Mr. Hooper
Young Goodman Brown is going into the forest with the most godly people he knows, but he hints several times that they are going into the woods to conduct some evil business. It makes the task even more sinister when he never fully explains what they are there to do, but it is implied that it has something to do with witchcraft, though they are not the ones who will be doing the witchcraft. A reader from 2002 stated that, “Young Goodman Brown, from the very beginning, is a man without faith. Whether the witch’s meeting was all a dream or not is irrelevant, because everyone has good and evil qualities and Young Goodman Brown is not willing to accept the reality of man and woman’s true nature”. I have to disagree with the first part of this statement. Goodman Brown starts out the story with almost too much faith. Every mention in the story of his faith in God and his wife Faith can be interpreted to mean one or the other, or possibly both. He loses both faiths at the end of the story. He believes Faith to be evil and cannot love her the way that he used to, and he no longer has faith in religion because he cannot get past the hypocrisy of the people in the congregation.
There is also a line between fantasy and reality in the story of “Young Goodman Brown”. It is never clearly defined whether he fell asleep in the woods or if the events in the woods actually happened. A student from 2002 wrote in their final exam that, “When the narrator poses the idea that the night was all a dream, there are many elements of the story that would point to that being true, but most readers have a hard time committing to the idea that such vivid recollections could be a dream”. I have to agree with this because it is very difficult to imagine that his whole life changed because of a vivid dream that he has when he is off to do an errand for both God and the devil. It would seem that even if it was just a dream, the conflict within him about what he had to do in the forest was so great that it changed him. It would seem feasible that he was possibly looking for a way to shut Faith out of his heart. Her pink ribbons suggest that she is not totally good or totally bad, but possibly that she is tainted somehow. Totally reaching here, but perhaps because Faith was pure/white once, and then blood (virgin) was spilled and mixed with the white to form the pink, and he could never look on her as pure. Perhaps this change in purity took place before Goodman Brown had met and married her (not uncommon in Puritan times despite the stereotypes) and that is why it was so easy for him to believe that she had taken part in this. Even if it was a dream, he needed an excuse to shut her out, and his bitterness over what Faith had done caused his rift with God. This would make me agree with the last half of the 2002 reader’s statement that Goodman Brown cannot accept the reality of the true nature of men and women. This makes sense whether he had the dream or he actually saw the meeting take place. There is some form of reality that he cannot deal with so he chooses to deal with it in a fantastical way that may be real or may not be.