The Minister's Black Veil, Nathaniel Hawthorne - William Bysshe Stein (essay date 1955)
William Bysshe Stein (essay date 1955)
SOURCE: “Notes and Queries: The Parable of the Antichrist in ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in American Literature, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, November, 1955, pp. 386-92.
[In the following essay, Stein claims that Hawthorne's “The Minister's Black Veil” is modeled on II Corinthians.]
The ambiguity of “The Minister's Black Veil” has been unnecessarily exaggerated in modern criticism,1 though, paradoxically, its critics have not been entirely at fault. In the note to the subtitle of the tale, “A Parable,” Hawthorne appears deliberately to sidetrack the impulse of the reader to seek an analogue to the action in the logical source—the New Testament. Instead he cites a historical origin for the symbol of the veil, the artifice of conflict in the plot. But then he alters certain facts concerning Mr. Hooper's prototype, a clergyman named Moody. One alteration is particularly...
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