Longinus’s treatise was about style in writing. We have to distinguish between two aspects of the sublime in order to see what was novel about the modern account of it. Boileau coined the famous phrase “je ne sais quoi” (literally, “I do not know”) to describe what made something sublime-something powerful, perhaps overwhelmingly so, but not conformable to some preexistent category, like that by which we think of beauty as harmonious (for example). But the sublime is something different, and what that difference is was interesting, first of all, to Longinus, then to Boileau, and then to the 18th-century theorists and philosophers (Edmund Burke, Hugh Blair, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel especially) and the 19th-century poets who followed them. The beautiful had been a perennial object of aesthetic and philosophical interest, from Plato onward. The word sublime is Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s height, or elevation, and it stuck. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas Boileau (1636– 1711) of Longinus’s third-century treatise Peri Hypsos (Of elevation) into French in 1674. ![]() The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. Just as the Reverend Hooper’s black veil obscures his face from the townspeople, so the narrator’s distant perspective obscures his thoughts and feelings from the reader.By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Febru This style matches the story’s theme of the fundamental unknowability of others’ minds. The story is written from a distant, third-person point of view, with very little insight given into the thoughts and feelings of its characters. In this story, the “monsters” aren’t literal, but rather the possibility of some secret sin committed by Reverend Hooper. ![]() The idea that “ghost or fiend” might “consort” with him behind his black veil further pushes this passage into the realm of Gothic literature, which was often filled with ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural horrors. Here the words “cloud,” “ambiguity,” “enveloped,” “terrors,” “shadow,” “darkly,” and “dreadful” all evoke the obscurity and uncertainty typical of Gothic horror-it is not what is seen, but rather what is left unseen, the possibility of monsters lurking in the shadows, that inspires fear in the Gothic. Even the lawless wind, it was believed, respected his dreadful secret, and never blew aside the veil. With self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium that saddened the whole world. It was said that ghost or fiend consorted with him there. Thus, from beneath the black veil, there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. This shift reflects the feelings of dread and horror that the black veil inspires in Milford’s townspeople. Hawthorne’s style consistently shifts into this more Gothic mode whenever Reverend Hooper’s black veil is being described. ![]() The style of the story vacillates between fairly concrete, straightforward descriptions of events and long, abstract sentences filled with poetic flourishes that evoke intense emotions, a style typical of Gothic literature. Hawthorne uses the language of the Gothic Sublime, evoking obscurity and mystery, to explore the idea that people’s minds are fundamentally unknowable, not only to each other but also to themselves. “The Minister’s Black Veil” follows in this tradition of the psychological Gothic. Nineteenth-century Gothic literature was especially interested in the obscurity and mystery of the human psyche a dark forest or a haunted house could serve as a metaphor for the uncharted regions of one’s own mind. The Gothic dwelt in scenery that was obscure or filled with unseen dangers-a dark forest, for example, or a misty moor. While Romanticism used the Sublime to create an effect of self-transcendence in readers, Gothic literature tended to use the Sublime to inspire fear and terror. Gothic literature was similarly interested in the Sublime, but with a subtle distinction.
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