Richard Harter Fogle (essay date 1948)
SOURCE: “An Ambiguity of Sin or Sorrow,” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 3, September, 1948, pp. 342-49.
[In the following essay, Fogle contends that the central message of Hawthorne's “The Minister's Black Veil” is intentionally ambiguous, leaving readers to choose among competing interpretations.]
Hawthorne's characteristic fusion of simplicity on the surface with layers of complexity beneath is perhaps nowhere more fully in evidence than in “The Minister's Black Veil,” a brief,...
Source: Short Story Criticism, ©2000 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
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