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Mr Hooper's Guilty Conscience Essay

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Mr Hooper's Guilty Conscience Essay
A theme that stood in the way of Mr. Hooper overcoming his committed sin is his guilty conscience. Mr. Hooper was guilty, which forced him to wear a black veil that made him feel as if his sin was non-existing. The gossip through the towns people weighs on Mr. Hooper’s conscious. The townspeople are feeling guilty due to the fact they have sins of their too that they should try to heal from. There are viewers who have dug deeper in the guilt factor that Hawthorne uses as a theme which is portrayed through symbolism. “The parishioners could not even sense the guilt of their sins because of the veil that covered their hearts. The people in the town see the minister as hiding a great sin behind the veil; however, they do not sense that they …show more content…
“Especially when there is a guilty conscience. Self-actualization for the guilty conscience, then involves the painful act of looking behind you at the trail of destruction you created and the hurt you have inflicted on others, as well as the lies you’ve told yourself” (Patterson 8). Here Patterson begins to depict the underlying truth of why a conscience begins to take a toll on a person. One who begins to lie to themselves seem to have a guilt lying on their conscience more than one who does not lie to themselves about a situation. Many people live with guilt lying on their conscience because they do not know how to either live with what has happened or they are still healing. Hawthorne was able to take Mr. Hooper’s guilty conscience as a way of incorporating the veil in the story. The point of Hawthorne using guilt as a major theme is to give the main purpose of the veil to have a purpose of being in the storyline. Without incorporating guilt into Mr. Hooper’s situation the veil would probably not be the headline of Hawthorne’s piece. With the three main themes Hawthorne was able to relate them all to each other, due to the fact that isolation, sin, and guilt all depend on each other through the whole story. Hawthorne being who he is, he is able to write romantic literature which is not the average love story and putting a twist on

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