The Minister's Black Veil
However, the congregation is met with an unusual sight: Mr. Hooper is wearing a black semi-transparent veil that obscures all of his face but his mouth and chin from view.
According to the text, "All through life the black veil had hung between him and the world: it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and still it lay upon his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his dark-some chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity".
[1] The story was published as "The Minister's Black Veil, a Parable" and credited "by the author of Sights from a Steeple" in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir for 1836; the issue also included Hawthorne's "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" and "The Wedding Knell".
But the interpretation of the story generally rests on some moral assessment or explanation of the minister's symbolic self-veiling.
Literary critic Edgar Allan Poe proposed that the issue of the minister's self-veiling was a mystery conceived to be solved or inferred by the reader.
[8] Hidden nature of guilt: Hooper arouses in a sermon the notion of secret sin and the sad mysteries in which we hide from our nearest and dearest.
When the Reverend Hooper makes the people aware of the darkness within his being, he dissolves the barrier between his repugnant, repressed self and his conscious self.
Hooper, in the story, announces to the congregation at his bedside that everyone wears a black veil; he implies that everyone has some form of secret guilt.
Communion of sinners: Hooper leads the townspeople in realizing that everyone shares sin no matter how much they try to avoid facing it.
In content, the lesson may be very much like the sermon on "secret sin" Hooper was scheduled to teach, but the townspeople are uncomfortable with the medium.
[12] Edgar Allan Poe speculated that Minister Hooper may have committed adultery with the lady who died at the beginning of the story, because this is the first day he begins to wear the veil, "and that a crime of dark dye, (having reference to the young lady) has been committed, is a point which only minds congenial with that of the author will perceive."
Minister Hooper also seems to be unable to tell his fiancée why he wears the veil due to a promise he has made, and is not willing to show his face to the lady even in death.
Each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the most hardened of breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought.
They sound loud and proud in being critical of the minister for his veil, but they are clearly weak and not confident inside their own minds about their personal salvation, so the harsh judgement of others could possibly be seen as a way to relieve themselves for a people were never sure about whether they were really going to heaven.
[17] When the story was published in Twice-Told Tales, an anonymous reviewer in the Boston Daily Advertiser for March 10, 1837, noted that he preferred "the grace and sweetness of such papers as 'Little Annie's Ramble,' or 'A Rill from the Town-pump,' to those of a more ambitious cast, and in which the page glows with a wider and more fearful interest, like 'The Minister's Black Veil' and 'Dr.
Poe claims that Hawthorne is a man of "truest genius" but needs to work on subject areas of his writing.
In his review of Twice-Told Tales, Poe also reveals a disdain for allegory, a tool which Hawthorne uses extensively.
[19] Reverend Hooper's sermon in the short story was the launching point of the dramatic work The Minister's Black Veil by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (2016), directed by Romeo Castellucci, with Willem Dafoe as Reverend Hooper, text by Claudia Castellucci and original music and sound design by Scott Gibbons.
