The short story The Minister’s Black Veil portrays human morality and life grievances, social relations and the role and importance of church in life of ordinary citizens. The tale can be divided into three parts: the initial appearance of the black veil; its additional appearances at an afternoon funeral, a night wedding, before a select group from the church that has been asked to interview Hooper, and before Elizabeth; and the consequences of Hooper’s actions, including his growing isolation, his growing powers as a clergyman, and his death.
Thesis
The themes of guilt, alienation and sin help Hawthorn to create a story conflict and unveil moral values of the main characters.
In the short story, characters seem immediately isolated from everyone else; the throng dissolves into separate, uncertain groups, in much the same way that the text begins to focus almost exclusively on the veil itself and hints at possible motives for Hooper’s wearing it. Notions of “secret sin” suggest the new power behind Hooper’s sermon, although his actual delivery remains exactly the same. “A veil” symbolizes sin and guilt which influence destinies and lives of the characters. In the initial sequencing of the text, the black veil achieves a strange power of its own, especially when Hooper leaves the church with the veil still on (Donoghue 215). The other characters, the narrator, and the reader am left with an image that not only remains a riddle but that suggests strange motivations, complicated by hints about Hooper’s separating himself from God and the sad smile that never seems to leave his face.(Idol et al 87). He does not merely represent the sin of isolation with his veil intact but, in continuing to wear it, actually commits the sin. Incrementally the text itself participates in this “iconization” of the “semblance of Mr. Hooper” in his black veil. Hawthorne’s relationship to his story “The Minister’s Black Veil” also begins to suggest Hooper’s to his black veil. In the second section of the story the black veil makes two ceremonial appearances and is questioned, more or less, in two interviews, thereby gaining in its near-obsessive importance in the text (Boone 166).
The sin and guilt help the author to concentrate his focus on isolated images and examine human morality and inner nature. Feeling of sin and guilt still exude some strange kind of power over him, the reader, and the text. Something continues to reside in them, or there is a quality about them that the text cannot fully explain (Donoghue 215). Whether the black marks on the page signify a yawning absence or whether the written image conjures up a glowering or mysterious presence, the upshot remains the same. The thing itself–the veil, the letter, or the house-or the words that both embody and disembody it has somehow outlasted the narrative sequencing of the text. Miller acknowledges “that the story is an allegory of the reader’s own situation in reading it” but goes on to suggest that “nothing happens except the proffering of an enigmatic sign” (Idol et al 87).
The veil can be interpreted as a symbol of alienation ad isolation. For instance, a lady comments that it is very strange how a simple black veil that may be part of a woman’s bonnet can render Hooper’s face so terrible when he chooses to wear it. A physician exclaims how the veil shadows Hooper’s entire person, so much so that it “makes him ghost-like” (Hawthorn). The image Hawthorne presents readers with is Hooper’s strange sad smile, which gleams, flickers, and glimmers beneath the dark obscurity of the veil, an image that remains as enigmatic as the veil itself, even though it seems to hint at Hooper’s motivations for donning it (Donoghue 215). Here readers may stop and consider the structures of response that have occurred within the tale up to this point. «At that moment Hooper should not be looking around him or comparing his black veil with other black veils that should be there. Besides, the parable is specious. Despite the view attributed to Infinite Purity, we are not sinners all alike” (Donoghue 215). Hooper’s own parishioners have decided that he is no longer himself, that the presence of the veil has rendered him, in their apprehension, as a person null and void. The veil’s presence that so mesmerizes them also creates his absence. The transformation in all cases is for the worse; the change is awful, frightening, and terrible; he may even be insane (Boone 166).
At the conclusion of “The Minister’s Black Veil”, the veil itself outlives the minister who wore it and the people who first paid obeisance to it: “The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial stone is moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper’s face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it moldered beneath the Black Veil” *(Hawthorne). Such a concentrated narrative form or gaze indicates that in these very conspicuous cases in Hawthorne’s fiction, image precedes and outlasts idea. An object precedes and outlasts the moral issues and confusions that the author and his characters believe it has generated (Donoghue 215). “Nicholas Canaday, Jr. maintains that “Hawthorne is not stressing secret sin in this tale, especially sexual sin. Hawthorne holds out the suggestion that the veil is a penance for an actual and serious crime, while at the same time permitting no real grounds for it” (36 cited Emmett 101).
Death and the minister, or rather the absence of life and the presence of the veil, can communicate with one another as faceless image to faceless image. Again, Hawthorne does not report the prayer that Hooper delivers from the staircase but only describes it, with its focus on “the dreadful hour” (Hawthorn), which suggests the day of doom: the judgment day in the Puritan’s dark, predetermined creed. Later, at the night wedding the black veil renders the bride corpselike, cold and pale like the maiden in her coffin, terrifies Hooper when he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and covers the entire earth, or so Hooper believes, when he rushes from the house out into the night. Finally, Elizabeth, who began her inquisition calmly and without terror but is now terrified of the veil’s power and presence, asks him one more time to take it off (Emmett 101) Yet Hooper, belaboring his loneliness and self-imposed isolation (and ignoring hers), exclaims, “Never!” Every attempt to get behind the veil has failed. It remains securely in place both on Hooper’s face and at the obsessive center of the text. The blackness of the veil suggests the absence of light, mourning, evil, and other demonic icons such as black cats and the black man of the Puritan forest. It encapsulates and focuses all the darker Puritan fears and traits (Idol et al 34).
Beyond Hooper’s vague explanations, his reaction to the sin, the unreadable image of “that same sad smile which always appeared like a faint glimmering of light, proceeding from the obscurity beneath the veil” (itself yet another obscure and tantalizing icon in the text), and beyond his congregation’s more explicit explanations and their reactions to it lies the fact of the veil itself and the rite of the tale in reenacting the very process of its growing presence into the dark idol that mesmerizes an entire community (Emmett 101). Thus, suggests Hawthorne, do these Puritans really worship, and such is the extent of their belief in darker powers that these powers engulf them. We of course are not Puritans, and yet we too are drawn into the mesmerizing tactics and sequential encounters of the text itself (Idol et al 21).
Along with the image-to-icon sequence, readers can also notice the growth in the intensity of observing the veil (Idol et al 37). At the wedding, “the first thing that [the peoples] eyes rested on… could portend nothing but evil” (Hawthorne). The eyes come to rest on the veil. Hooper’s catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror “Involved his own spirit in the horror with which [the veil] overwhelmed all the others” (Hawthorne). The members of the church who go to interrogate him imagine they are being stared at from behind the veil by “Mr. Hooper’s eye, which they felt to be fixed upon them with an invisible glance” (Hawthorne). Elizabeth’s eyes are at first “fixed… steadfastly upon the veil” (Hawthorne) without any feeling of terror, but at the end of the interview, “her eyes were fixed insensibly on the black veil,” and she leaves, though not before offering up “one long, shuddering gaze” (Hawthorne).
As the veil increases in power, so does the accompanying gaze, as focused as the gaze of the mesmerist, which similarly increases in power. The gaze both creates and is created by the image as it becomes an icon. In the last third of the tale, Hawthorne spotlights Hooper’s isolation: he is incarcerated “in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart” (Hawthorne). He is at once avoided, dreaded, and fled from; some think that ghosts and fiends consort with him beneath the veil; others think he suffers from some great crime, some ponderous “ambiguity of sin or sorrow” (Hawthorne). All remain frightened and terrified and shudder in his presence (Emmett 101). The veil, triumphant at the last in its mesmerizing powers, embodies the sense that everyone is “gazing through a medium that saddened the whole world” (Hawthorne). The personal isolation, however, contributes to Hooper’s effectiveness and efficiency as a clergyman, and people come to call him Father Hooper, the name that is given to Catholic priests, themselves associated with all kinds of “un-Puritan” icons, idols, and sacraments. They feel with their sense of sin and inadequacy that “they had been with him behind the black veil” (Hawthorne), and his election sermon produces a political year filled with gloom and piety (Emmett 101).
Hooper’s ultimate isolation is, of course, his death. And even on his deathbed there is one more person, the Reverend Mr. Clark of Westbury, who asks him to remove the veil and leave no shadow on the purity of his memory. Hooper refuses, of course, and responds as he had to Elizabeth so many years ago: “Never!” He offers the explanation that he will unveil himself only when everyone else does the same and that only at that moment of ultimate universal unveiling, if he kept his veil in place, would he appear to be the monster that everyone takes him to be in life. In the final paragraph Hawthorne uses the word veiled three times and the phrase veiled corpse twice. Hooper’s face eventually turns to dust, “but awful is still the thought, that it mouldered beneath the Black Veil!” (Hawthorne). The name of the story and its last words, “Black Veil,” become identical, for the text has not only participated in and conjured up the veil and its “elevation,” but text and veil have also merged with one another (Emmett 101).
And in order to achieve that vision, Hawthorne has created a text that reproduces the many attributes of a mesmeric trance in its increasing intensity of gaze, its susceptibility to strange influences and sympathies, and its description of the awful power seemingly inherent in images become-icons (Idol et al 82). Such an experience exists as a kind of warning or self discovery on the part of both reader and writer. Such are the elusive powers of Hawthorne’s major romances as well and one of the keys to his mesmeric art. it exerts a fatal presence on all who gaze upon or see through it, for in the end, so powerful has it become that we can almost agree with the Reverend Hooper’s last cry: “I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!” That reenactment is essential to an understanding of the powers and accomplishments of Hawthorne’s best fiction. As such it precedes the moral and ethical complications and contradictions that occur as a result of the consequences that follow this process. The subtext of this short story precedes the complex moral questions for which he has become justly famous (Idol et al 82). It is in these structures of response that the true power of Hawthorne’s fiction lies, to the point where the veil seems to precede the validation of values, even though his fascination with icons and idolatry is as much deeply enmeshed in moral and ethical questions and concepts as it is thoroughly entangled in the powers and processes of mesmerism. To wrestle only with the moral and ethical questions that he raises would be to miss the true force and focus of his fiction.
In sum, themes of guilt, alienation and isolation are expressed through the symbol of veil used as a material object and spiritual barriers between the characters. All rational explanations, observations, and interpretations about the veil fail to provide a final understanding of it. It remains a mysterious emblem both throughout the story and at the end of it, half-created by and half-creating the ritual of gazing that the text has embodied. The author discovers the psychological compulsion within human perception that compels us–characters, narrator, readers–to worship powerful objects and images. However much the Puritans rely on creeds, logic, and language to control and interpret these images, no sermon or pulpit will ever fully be able to accomplish that task.
Works Cited
Boone, N.S. “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Hawthorne’s Ethical Refusal of Reciprocity: A Levinasian Parable. Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, 57 (2005): 165.
Donoghue, D. Hawthorne and Sin. Christianity and Literature, 52 (2003); 215.
Emmett, P. J. Narrative Suppression: Sin, Secrecy and Subjectivity in “The Minister’s Black Veil” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 25 (2004.): 101.
Idol, J. L., Jones, B., Inge, M. Th. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews (American Critical Archives). Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hawthorne, N. The Minister’s Black Veil. Web.