Journal for Hawthorne

"The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A few shook their sagacious heads, intimating that they could penetrate the mystery; while one or two affirmed that there was no mystery at all, but only that Mr. Hooper's eyes were so weakened by the midnight lamp, as to require a shade."

"The obvious meaning of ["The Minister's Black Veil"] will be found to smother its insinuated one. The moral put into the mouth of the dying minister will be supposed to convey the true import of the narrative; 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."

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-120253/Narrative-suppression-sin-secrecy-and.html

Upon first reading "The Minister's Black Veil" I got the impression that the story was really about the reaction of the Puritan townspeople to the minister's veil, and the power of group perceptions in a homogeneous population who is anxious to appear pious. There were things that were puzzling in the story, but I didn't stop to think about them, taking the minister's own explanation for his veil at face value.

Hawthorne says it is a parable, and I decided it must be a symbolic treatment of the consciousness of sin and guilt and the secrets that all humans harbor, especially New England Calvinists in the nineteenth century. But the article containing the above quote made me reread the story and pay attention to the details that belie the minister's own purported motives. The article writer's thesis is that the narrator of the story is seeking to conceal the real crime of the minister by generalizing it and treating his penance as a symbol for the sins of all of us. The assertion is based on a claim by Poe to have discovered that the minister's sin was a sexual transgression with the young lady whose funeral is held the afternoon of the day Hooper first appears veiled. A second reading revealed much that was at odds with the simple explanation that the minister gives for his decision to don a veil. Almost everything that the writer of the article mentions is something I had noted as odd, but I didn't dwell on.I was reacting to the discrepancies in the narrative the same way that the townspeople were, by ignoring them. The footnote at the beginning relating the story of a real -life minister seems curiously gratuitous at first. The narrator's account is full of oddities. He tells us that Hooper was supposed to have changed places with a minister from another parish, but that minister had canceled because he was to officiate at a funeral. But Hooper himself was due to conduct a funeral, so he had just as much reason to cancel. If the parishioners are such fools to be afraid of a mere piece of cloth, why does his reflected image cause such terror in Hooper himself? If he is trying to make a simple point about the sin in everyone's heart, why persist for a lifetime in a symbolic act whose impact was felt at once?

There is much in the story to suggest that the "parable" about the sins of all of us is hiding something that has to do with the young lady of the funeral. His sorrow at the young lady's funeral is "tender and heart-dissolving," but there is no such sentiment associated with his loss of Elizabeth, who is described very unromantically as his "plighted wife". The bride at the wedding is conflated by the minister's presence with the dead woman of the funeral.

In a broader sense the story can be seen as a parable about language itself, and the fact that any revealing is also of necessity at the same time a concealing. The quote from the story, about some people attributing the veil to the minister's problems with his eyes, is interesting when we look at the narrative itself as a veil covering the minister's very particular secret sin. The "sagacious" ones are making excuses for the minister, just as the whole story is serving as an elaborate obfuscation.