An Examination of Sin and its use on the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
...d ethnic purity, this was a very heady topic for the nineteenth century; to many people, it is still as heady today. Obviously when Goodman Brown went into the forest, he naively believed that his fellow Puritans were actually pure, in thought, word, and deed. The possibility that destroying the villages of heathen Indians, or tormenting practitioners of other faiths, or burning witches, could be evil never occurred to him; that is simply what good Christians did to keep their ranks undefiled. In tying these works to the Devil, however, Hawthorne is explicitly saying that intolerance is evil. Goodman Brown, who returns to Salem determined to be more "pure" than anyone else in town, in fact becomes a failure as a human being. This story, more logical than “Young Goodman Brown”, conveys the concepts of sin as well. Hawthorne begins his odd story with a dramatic, yet unexplained, change in the appearance of the town's pastor. Up until the particular Sunday when the story opens, Mr. Hooper has appeared as "a gentlemanly person, of about thirty, who, though still a bachelor, dressed with due clerical neatness, as if a careful wife had starched his band, and brushed the weekly dust from his Sunday’s garb." One Sunday, however, he suddenly adopts something new: "swathed about his forehead, and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by his breath, Mr. Hooper had on a black veil. On a nearer view it seemed to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things." This "darkened aspect" is very important, for if it does not give us a clue as to the reason Parson Hooper adopted the veil on this particular Sunday, it parallels the changed viewpoint of the minister toward life, and foreshadows the effect it will continue to have on him throughout the remainder of the story. We soon come to learn, for example, that the veil "threw its obscurity between him and the holy page, as he read the Scriptures." Hawthorne is making a dual reference to the fact that the veil obscured Parson Hooper’s face from view as he read the Bible and that in doing so this made the Bible itself seem more obscure. For whatever reason, Hooper has come to the conclusion that human beings in their sinfulness are irrevocably far from God. Nothing he can do, in terms of reading the Scriptures, counseling the troubled, or living his faith, can really bring his congregation into full communion with God because people are simply too worldly. Hooper, however, is different. He is not different because he is free from sin. He is only too aware of his mortal sinfulness but he is different because of the profundity of his awareness of sin. This is what really separates him from his fellow humans; the black veil is simply a symptom of it. Because he is so conscious of his sinfulness, he cannot share in the simple joys of living enjoyed by his parishioners. Worse, after donning the veil, Parson Hooper also finds himself incapable of clarifying the Scriptures, because together with his awareness of his own sinfulness, he has become more aware of the obscurity of the ways of God. Consequently, the only way he has remaining to perform his ecclesiastic office is to serve as a living example of his faith and a warning to those who see him. This is clearly shown in the story’s dramatic conclusion, when the minister tending to Hooper on his deathbed tries to remove the black veil, and Hooper resists so violently the younger minister is frightened. The final selection dealing with the themes of sin is Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”. In this story a scientist by the name of Aylmer has a wife who has a strange birthmark on her body. Hawthorne assures us; on the other hand...