American Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Submissions 2016 (midterm assignment) 2. Short Essay 2a. Highlight and analyze a passage from our course readings

Caryn Livingston

Hawthorne’s Sad Heroic Individual

          In understanding the concept of the heroic individual standing apart from society, Emerson’s Self-Reliance seems the most obvious choice. However, as someone who found Emerson’s arguments lacking in persuasive power, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories The Minister’s Black Veil and Young Goodman Brown are very affecting in their depiction of an individual struggle in the face of a weak and corrupt society. Particularly, certain passages in The Minister’s Black Veil highlight how Father Hooper lived as a man apart from society even in the midst of his community and as a pillar of it, simply by hiding his face with a piece of black cloth. Though otherwise behaving as always and unchanged overall, he is rejected for his action by a community aghast at behavior they cannot understand and what it may signify.

          The scene that most effectively depicts the heroic individual’s rejection of society is at Father Hooper’s deathbed when another minister attempts to remove Hooper’s black veil before he dies. Father Hooper has become infamous for his veil and remained a respected but feared individual throughout his life, as the act of hiding his face forces him apart from the rest of society. At the moment just before his death, Hooper calls down a judgment on those gathered around him and society in general for its rejection of him, claiming that it is the physical manifestation of his veil only that all of his congregation, friends, and fiancée shrank from. “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,” Hooper says during this scene, because everyone living in the society keeps himself veiled metaphorically even to his closest friends and loved ones while shunning Hooper for wearing a physical reminder of their own concealment.

          The reason I find this scene so powerful when Emerson’s essay seemed more self-aggrandizing is due to the lack of essentialism in Hawthorne’s depiction of society. Hawthorne does not condemn society as something irredeemable but focuses instead on what it actually is—a collection of individuals who are all constantly faced with the decision to be influenced by their own consciences or the opinions of others. Transcendentalist philosophers like Emerson frequently reject common feeling among people as merely a symptom of society rather than shared traits of humanity to be accepted, as when in Self-Reliance Emerson writes, “When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way.” This is contrasted with Hawthorne’s Father Hooper, who rather than only praise individual virtue instead laments society’s failings and that he must stand separate from them, as when he begs his betrothed, “O! you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil. Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity forever!”

Hooper, at his death, chooses to be buried in his veil because the people in society have failed to live honestly toward one another, but Hawthorne still credits the individual members with making the choice of concealment. Like Father Hooper, any of them could have made the choice to acknowledge their shared failing of concealment of their truths from one another; they also could have accepted Father Hooper despite his veil or even made the choice to stop hiding themselves. While Emerson’s essay sounds more optimistic, with his declaration that “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” Emerson leaves no room for redemption of society and no room to consider the cost of rejecting it, which is that loneliness that Father Hooper begged his fiancée Elizabeth to spare him from. Father Hooper may be heroic in his willingness to stand apart from his community, but realistically, he pays a price for his heroism.