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"thus they sat a considerable time, speechless, confused, and shrinking uneasily from Mr. Hooper's eye, which they felt to be fixed upon them with an invisible glance. Finally, the deputies returned abashed to their constituents, pronouncing the matter too weighty to be handled, except bt a council of the churches, if indeed, it might not require a general synod." Posted by schoolgirl09 on Aug 19, 2008. |
The Minister's Black Veil: A Paradigm Group
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This passage expresses Nathaniel Hawthorne's anti-transcendentalist views, because he believed that evil was a strong force in the world. It expresses the limitations of the human intellect to understand and the potential destructive forces that lie in the human spirit. The men who are judging the minister's black veil feel compelled to refer it to a higher authority, seeing something sinister or evil in the veil's meaning. They are intimidated by what they don't understand, they respond in a fearful way to the minister's veil. It reflects a dark, gloomy outlook of the world, dominated by fear and suspicion, similar to the beliefs that dominated the Puritans, during the Salem witchtrials, of which Hawthorne was a direct descendant. Transcendentalists believed in seeing the divine in the natural world and in respecting the individual spirit as a means of finding truth. Posted by pmiranda2857 on Aug 19, 2008. |
