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Park, Yong-jun. “A Study on the Conflict between Ideal and Desire in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 39. 3 (2013): 25-47. This article aims at revisiting the meaning of perception in the early American ideals in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories. Probing deep into the repetitive themes of the relationship between the individual and society, Hawthorne tries to find the double-sidedness between ideals and desires in his characters. In “the Minister’s Black Veil,” Parson Hooper chooses a contradictory self-isolation from an introspective ideal in spite of his job as a mediator between people and God. Though Hooper has an ideal for repentance from original sin, he demands his self-delusive methods without communicating with the congregation, and there is no reconciliation between them in the end. In the turbulent era between the religious ideal and actual human perception, Hawthorne represents and suggests various ways of finding out the “neutral ground” between their dreams and desires. The other way of representing the conflict between them is through the thought of effect for science, perceived as an empirical and ideal way for fulfilling their dreams at the same time. But the blind obedience to science and its opposite for contorted desires described in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” make them co-destructed, as Hawthorne described as “Ruined Eden.” From these perspectives, we might find Hawthorne’s intention in his works to be not a writer of imaginative or vague ideals, but a mediator between the human dream and desire, and find the warning that he is afraid of. (Sangji University)