The Minister's Black Veil - Richard Harter Fogle (essay date 1952)
Richard Harter Fogle (essay date 1952)
SOURCE: "The Minister's Black Veil," in Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, University of Oklahoma Press, 1952, pp. 33-40.
[In the following essay, Fogle argues that Hawthorne failed to achieve the full potential of "The Minister's Black Veil."]
Hawthorne's characteristic fusion of surface simplicity and underlying complexity is perhaps nowhere more clearly evident than in "The Minister's Black Veil," a brief, highly typical, and thoroughly successful story. It is subtitled "A Parable," and the outer meaning of the parable is abundantly clear. An apparently blameless minister inexplicably dons a black veil and wears it throughout his lifetime, despite many well-meant pleas to cast it off. On his deathbed he reveals its secret and its justification:
What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost...
[The entire page is 2402 words long]
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