The Minister’s Black Veil

3 Pages 810 Words

The Minister’s Black Veil

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, the author chooses to mask the character of the minister with the black veil to construct an allegory that would compare sin concocted by imagination with unrecognized sin of one’s self. The story “The Minister’s Black Veil” is symbolic of the hidden sins that we hide and separate ourselves from the ones we love most. In wearing the veil, Hooper presents the isolation that everybody experiences when chained down by own sins. He has realized that everybody symbolically can be found in the shadow of his or her own veil. By Hooper, wearing this shroud across his face is only showing the dark side of people and the truth of human existence and nature.
With the story being set in the Puritan period of the settlement of New England, as nearly all of Hawthorne’s stories are, the reader can logically infer a certain set of value judgments. For instance, these people, being very sincere about their religion, are likely to see anything out of the ordinary, such as a black-veiled minister, as a serious issue that undermines their faith. On the surface, the first sight of the veil not only confuses the congregation, but scares them as well. This man is supposed to be their most direct mode of communication with God, and to see him in what they perceive to be quite a bizarre condition must make them feel that their religious lives may be in danger.
Yet another character trait held by this community is its inability to cope with even the slightest bit of change. Something as trivial as a man covering his face with black crape paper literally whips this community into a frenzy. “I don’t like it” (p.102), cried the old woman, “Our parson has gone mad” (p.102), cried Goodman Gary. Without even the slightest bit of investigation into the issue these people have brewed in their imaginations all sorts of theories as to what is so ...