Transcendentalism and Anti-trascendentalism
Transcendentalism and Anti-Transcendentalism:A closer look at the short story "The Minister's Black Veil""The Minister's Black Veil" is in opposition to the transcendentalist movement, because the story or the main character of it wants to show the reader, that Men is evil and full of sins. Transcendentalism is a movement of writers, who believe that Nature, God and Men are divine. That means that you can find Men as well as God in Nature. The purpose of this special kind of thinking is, to bring the society back and closer to the nature again.Transcendentalist writers also want to show the good part of human being. They believe that there can't be an original sin, because God is "good" and because of that everyone has to be good in his or her inner world as well.An example for a writer of the transcendentalist movement is Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a transcendentalist he believes that Men are divine. In his essay "Self-Reliance" he says that "we are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents." (Emerson, page 215) He wants to say that every person, who is self-reliant, has to be divine, because self-reliance means that you can trust yourself and in order to trust yourself you need intuition or an i
In opposition to transcendentalism is anti-transcendentalism. For his parishioners "he changed himself into something awful by only hiding his face". And by letting Hooper wearing a black veil, Hawthorne shows that Hooper is different. By saying that the veil "threw its obscurity between him and the holy page, as he read the Scriptures", Hawthorne makes a remark to the fact that the veil "obscures" Hooper's face from the view of others as he read the Bible and because of the fact that he seems to be obscure this makes the Bible seem obscure itself. Because of that believe, anti-transcendentalists profound criticism of the transcendentalist optimism. And he also thinks now that he is now unable to read and clarify the Scriptures anymore, because together with the awareness of his own sinfulness he becomes more and more aware of the obscurity of God too. That doesn't mean that he is free from sins, but he is aware of his sinfulness. Therefore every human being is born with the sin of Eva. In this story the symbol is the black veil. But this aspect is contradictory to Hooper, because he came to the conclusion that human beings are all full of sins and because of that far away from God. The black veil seems to "give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things". At the end it is important to mention that the story "The Minister's Black Veil" is a parable, which uses a symbol to convey a moral message. They know that every human being also has good parts in his or her inner world, but these parts are not as "big" as the original sin.
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Acceptance Essays
