The Minister's Black Veil, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Richard Harter Fogle (essay date 1948)
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, 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 life-time, in despite of many well-meant pleas to cast it off. On his deathbed he reveals its secret and its justification.
What, but the mystery which...
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