Comparing Evil in Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville Essay

Lionel Trilling once said, A proper sense of evil is surely an attribute of a great writer. (98-99) Although he made the remark in a different context, one would naturally associate Hawthorne and Melville with the comment, while Emersons might be one of the last names to mind. For the modern reader, who is often in the habit of assuming that the most profound and incisive apprehension of reality is a sense of tragedy, Emerson seems to have lost his grip. He has often been charged with a lack of vision of evil and tragedy. Yeats, for example, felt that Whitman and Emerson have begun to seem superficial, precisely because they lack the Vision of Evil (qtd. in Matthiessen 181). There is no doubt that Emerson was†¦show more content†¦(1038) There are Chaos and the Dark, but man can soar over them by unfurling beautiful wings and become an angel of wisdom. (Emerson, American Scholar 1083). It is a duty of Man Thinking to guide men by showing the facts amidst appearances and accepting poverty and solitude. He can and should convert a mulberry leaf into satin and sometimes evil itself can be a guide for good; Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. (American Scholar 1082) Moral and natural evil appear in experience but they are not ultimate realities, only relative and transitory. But Emersons belief and reality often clashed head-on with each other. Emerson knew the ideal often exists only in thought and lived by and large only in the mind. In his later essay Experience, his doubt is conveyed quite clearly. In this essay he wanted to reaffirm the hope of humanity and presumably he didnt intend to express such a feeling as frustration, but it is certainly there. The essay opens with a tone of bewilderment: Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair, there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by whichShow MoreRelatedAre Women Destructive Forces?1674 Words   |  7 PagesBell once said that the quality of a lady is not calculated through the sufferings her adversities in life had given her, but through the degree of her refusal to permit those adversities to direct her and decide who she ends up to be. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in the early 1800’s about a disgraced woman who emerged from the shadows to alter the precise definition of the disgraceful letter â€Å"A† on her chest. Later, John Steinbeck composed Of Mice and Men in the 1930’s that depicted