Walt Whitman personifies every positive aspect of the American Dream. Both his writing and his person perfectly exemplify everything that the conceptual America attempts to awaken in its citizens. If America presents as wealth of opportunity, Walt Whitman is the man who explored every road he stumbled across. His claim to the American Voice comes through his own realization of the American Dream: he is the nation’s golden boy, rising to prominence through self-education and sheer willpower. By asserting himself as worthy, he becomes worthy by the American standard. When he boldly declares “for that which was lacking among you all, yet needed most, I bring,” (2) in his poem “Shut Not Your Doors,” he cements himself as of America, united with America.
Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,
For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed most, I bring;
A book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers,
And for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades;
The words of my book nothing, the life of it everything;
A book separate, not link’d with the rest, nor felt by the intellect;
But you will feel every word, O Libertad! arm’d Libertad!
It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air,
With joy with you, O soul of man.
Hawthorne, however, cannot escape the American Dream’s hypocrisy. With ancestors who prosecuted “witches” in the Salem trials, his conscience is wrought with the false notions of morality on which the Puritans operated. His short story “Young Goodman Brown” reflects this idea. In the story, a supposedly upstanding member of Puritan society goes to meet the devil in a dark forest. When he arrives on the scene, he finds most all other “upstanding” members of his society communing with a figure implied to be Satanic in nature. Their leader proclaims “there are all whom ye have reverenced…Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness…” (Hawthorne 803) While these lines immediately apply to the religious contradictions of outward perfection versus inward sin, the notion remains intact when applied to the American Dream. The outward, Whitman-esque whimsical ideal of opportunity masks the seedy underbelly of oppression on top of which the positive, privileged version of the American Dream was built.