ABSTRACT
The passage is characteristic of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of paradox. On the one hand, it attests to his engagement with community. On the other hand, that very impulse serves to highlight his self-conscious connection to his radical heroine. Hence, the pertinence of Hawthorne’s use of paradox and, more accurately, the distinction in degree he assumes between paradox and ambiguity—paradox as a variant type of ambiguity, providing a source of sustained tension within an overall aesthetic-cultural design. More accurately, Ralph Waldo Emerson had mystified its contradictions through the paradox of America. His early writings distinguish between Jacksonian society and the “true America,” as between ideology and utopia. Emerson demonstrates how the same visionary appeal that restricts dissent within the bounds of the American ideology may also turn “America”—rhetorically and, hence, morally and politically—into an ideological battleground. For Emerson individualism centered first and last on the independent self.
