The Minister's Black Veil, Nathaniel Hawthorne - W. B. Carnochan (essay date 1969)
W. B. Carnochan (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: “‘The Minister's Black Veil’: Symbol, Meaning, and the Context of Hawthorne's Art,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 2, September, 1969, pp. 182-92.
[In the following essay, Carnochan contends that “The Minister's Black Veil” is concerned mostly with the literary nature of symbols, and that questions about Mr. Hooper's moral character would be viewed by Hawthorne as comparatively trivial.]
“The Minister's Black Veil,” one of Hawthorne's early tales (1836), has a reputation as one of his best. It has had less attention than, say, “Rappaccini's Daughter” or “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” no doubt because it is in some ways less problematic and is a less bravura piece than are they. Still the story presents its own kind of difficulties, and there is no critical unanimity among its readers. On one view the Reverend Mr. Hooper is a saintly figure, calling his people to...
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