#1-2. Reflective Essay: The Ambitious Guest

Ye Ji Park / 111053 / 11b3

Mr. Richard Menard

American Literature

March 6 2012

Reflective Essay: The Ambitious Guest

Frederick Douglass, a former slave and later an eminent leader of the abolitionist movement, wrote in his autobiography about the hardship he underwent when learning how to read. The more he learned, the more he read, and the more he suffered – because the reading “opened [his] eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out”. Books taught him that whites have no rational reason to enslave blacks, but did not suggest solutions to reform the unfair slavery system. Douglass yearned for past years when his illiteracy blinded his eyes so that he could not perceive the “horrible pit” he was inside.

This narration popped to my mind as the class mentioned the term “bliss of ignorance” while discussing The Ambitious Guest (Nathaniel Hawthorn). In this short novel, there lives a family in the “bleakest spot of all New England”, where mountains “towered above their heads so steep that the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight”. The place is desolated; the family knows nothing of life in city, where rapid and extensive urbanization was taking place in those days. Instead of dreaming about glory, power, and wealth, the family lived in solitude, surrounded by magnificent nature.

One September night, a young traveler knocks the door of family’s cottage to ask for one night room and board. He, relaxed by warm and affectionate welcome of the family, starts talking about his “high and abstracted ambition”. The lad firmly believes that a great glory is waiting for him on his path of destiny, and refuses to live an unnamed, trivial life. Listening to his words, the family slowly starts to consent to him; the father states that “there is something natural in what the young man says”, that is, he is in favor of fervor ambition the lad holds. They then dream about things that they presently do not possess in their simple life. The father imagines that his life might be very different in city—maybe as a fair lawyer—from now. Succeeding her father, the daughter thinks about intense love and romantic adventures, which could never happen in the present monotonous and desolate life.

Once the family is inspired by the ambitious guest, and immersed by their own ambitious dreams, they do not notice the approaching catastrophe of the slide beforehand. In total confusion, the family and the guest evacuate to the refuge where they thought to be safe, but their judgment was wrong – they all crush to death in the shelter, while the house remained all right. What Hawthorn tries to say via such tragic ending is simple; that ambition is an evil, wicked emotion, and that dreaming about unattainable goal will eventually lead to destruction. Hawthorn indicates that if the family disregarded the lad’s ambition, saying that they satisfy with their ignorant life in this barren land, they would have been aware of the slide much quicker and predicts that the house is safer place than the refuge. As the Dark Romantics argue – that the truth of the world, once revealed, is dark, corrupted, and wicked – Hawthorn claims that it is better for humans not to be aware of ambition and larger world. He believes in the bliss of ignorance.

So, is ignorance really bliss?

Frederick Douglass once believed that his literacy was a curse that lead him agonize over insoluble problem of slavery. And later, he became the living symbol of an independent black American citizen, with his pungent anti-slavery writings and numbers of honor bestowed. Ignorance was definitely bliss in his early ages, but not in his whole life. If Douglass stayed illiterate during his whole life, he would have never realized that slavery is unreasonable, unfair system, thus never decided to devote his whole life as an abolitionist. His access to reading made him suffer at first, by showing Douglass a seemingly-insurmountable barrier. But by learning the existence of this barrier, Douglass could at least try to climb it, thereby contributing one step to the Emancipation Proclamation.

This is same for the family in The Ambitious Guest. Their exposure to the guest’s ambition, and desire for far-off dream, may seem futile and meaningless at first; it might make the family not concentrate on the present, thus bring them devastating end as the novel’s ending. Nevertheless, present is not everything; people need to dream grand future, so that they can endeavor to reach that goal and achieve improvement. If I were Hawthorn, I would bet on bliss of painful yet awakening enlightenment, not on bliss of ignorance – maybe my ending will not be traceless annihilation of the family, but them desperately trying to survive from the slide, to achieve their dreams of being a lawyer or falling in ardent love someday.