[In the following essay, Altschuler contends that “The Minister's Black Veil” represents one of Hawthorne's most explicit condemnations of the spiritual teachings and revivalism that fueled the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s.]

Much of Hawthorne's “history” involves moral “tendency.” He takes doctrines that developed out of Puritanism, like Antinomianism and Separatism in “The Man of Adamant,” and carries them to their logical conclusion. They lead to solipsism; the young Roger Williams should have rejected communion with everyone, including his wife. Ann Hutchinson should have had an evening prayer meeting only with herself. But tendency is not always actuality, and despite the numbers of congregational separations following the Great Awakening, Puritanism did not die of the proliferation of Richard Digbys in its “reductive” left wing. “The Minister's Black Veil,” for example, illustrates a more complex situation. If “The Man of Adamant” is about the road the Antinomian-Separatist might take, “The Minister's Black Veil” reveals the response of a thoughtful “main-stream” Puritan, a non-separating Separatist, aware of his responsibilities in the Puritan community, and desiring shared experience, yet conscious of the degree to which he must separate from others. The destiny of a covenanted community is a collective destiny (thus Winthrop's admonition that the Puritans be “knitt together”), but awareness of sin is a personal affair that tends to separate men when it might unite them.

With the exception of a brief footnote in Michael Bell,¹ critics have ignored when the tale takes place. Hooper is clearly a man affected by the tumult of the Great Awakening. He preaches an election sermon during the administration of Governor Belcher, which would place the story between 1730 and 1741. The reader is given ample evidence of the declension of piety rampant in the populace and of the almost stereotyped enthusiastic responses to Awakening ministerial exhortation. Hawthorne's initial description of the congregation makes the need for Awakening abundantly clear. “Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on weekdays.”² Thus, the Sabbath seemed to heighten carnality rather than sense of sin.

Enter the Reverend Mr. Hooper, who had had “the reputation of a good preacher but not an energetic one; he strove to win his people heavenward by mild, persuasive influences, rather than to drive them thither by the thunders of the Word.”³ Hawthorne may have used the Reverend Mr. Ruggles of Guilford, Connecticut, as his model for the unconverted Mr. Hooper of Milford, Connecticut. Ruggles is described in Trumbull's History of Connecticut (which appears on Kesselring's list of books Hawthorne read) as “a scholar and a wise man; his morals were not impeachable; but he was a dull and unanimating preacher; and had a great talent in hiding his real sentiments, never coming fully out either as to doctrinal or experimental religion”⁴ (italics mine). But Hooper is somehow converted. Hawthorne does not describe the nature of his conversion experience precisely because the Puritans never fully solved the dilemma of the verbalization of such an experience. The yet unregenerate could only understand conversion by experience; the regenerate could believe a verbal account of it only to the degree to which it resembled their recollection of their own experience. The sensitive Hooper was aware that not only had he hidden his real sentiments but that everybody did so. The veil was an outward manifestation and reminder of the distance between man and man—to Hooper, an unbridgeable distance.

The response of the congregation can be seen as Hawthorne's critique of the Great Awakening. At the sight of the black veil and in response to Hooper's sermon on secret sin “each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought. Many spread their clasped hands on their bosoms … with every tremor of his melancholy voice, the hearers quaked.”⁵ The Awakening had an equal effect upon the innocent and the guilty, on those who might have had an evil passing thought and on those who had committed sins. In fact, given the Puritan mentality, the “innocent” might be more sensitive to their depravity than the “guilty.” After all, a true sense of sin was the beginning of salvation. Hawthorne carefully added a vitally important postscript to this unmistakable language of enthusiastic response. At the close of the service the people filed out of the church “conscious of lighter spirits the moment they lost sight of the black veil.”⁶ The awful effects of Hooper's preaching were by no means long-lasting. In fact, none as on former occasions walked by the minister's side. All went their separate ways.

The most significant result of Hooper's conversion experience is the degree of alienation between him and the surrounding community. This was by no means an uncommon occurrence during the unsettling years of the Great Awakening. Hawthorne could scarcely have missed Trumbull's constant references to separatism as a consequence of the Old-Light/New-Light controversy: “Instead of loving and cleaving to the ministers, who had been their spiritual fathers … they were strangely alienated from them.”⁷ No longer did Hooper break bread with Old Squire Saunders. For many, in fact, he could no longer perform the ministerial function. One lady in the congregation declared that she “would not be alone with him for the world.”⁸ When the parishioners sent a deputation to ask Hooper about the veil, they found it impossible to converse with him. That they in no way understood him is apparent in their proposed solution to the problem. Hooper had stressed the personal nature of conversion and the importance of the realization that sin is a personal matter, but the congregation thought only in terms of larger authoritative units. The deputies pronounced the matter of Hooper's veil “too weighty to be handled, except by a council of churches, if indeed, it might not require a general synod.”⁹ Such had been the fate of the vaunted congregational system. The ideas of the congregation were anathema to those newly converted by the Awakening and represent the distance between the gloomy minister and his congregation. They moved to embrace institutions even as he separated himself from them.

If the congregation walked away from its minister, Hooper galloped away from them. The veil was one of separation; of that there was no question. But Hooper did not retire to a Digby-like cave; he was not content to dwell in the Tents of Kedar. On the contrary, he remained as minister to his flock, though that flock could no longer understand him. He held to the community although every theological impulse in him told him that he must separate. Man's fate was to be separate because sin was secret and language inadequate to communicate it to another. In “Young Goodman Brown” Hawthorne had revealed the awful consequences that attended the doctrine of visible sanctity. In “The Minister's Black Veil” he filled in the details with a far more subtle protagonist. Hooper knew that visible sanctity bore no relation to regeneracy. Yet, good Calvinist that he was, he knew that there were the sinners and the saved. Given the impossibility of knowing one another, then, a community of saints could never be found. Could there, then, be any community at all?

Hooper seemed to deny it, but he clumsily resisted. He continued in his ministerial function, attempting to officiate at a wedding, perhaps the most simple and powerful act of community, a sacrament that he had denied himself. Although he tried to be cheerful and even raised his glass in a pleasant toast to the new-married couple, he cast an air of gloom about the proceedings. Significantly, when he tried to drink a glass of wine, symbolic of holy communion, his “frame shuddered, his lips grew white, he spilt … [it] upon the carpet, and rushed forth into the darkness.”¹⁰ He had consciously attempted, partially at least, to live in the community, but his newly awakened senses had made him separate.

The dramatic climax of his dilemma came in the interview with Elizabeth, his plighted wife. He explained to her why he must wear the veil for all his mortal days. At first “merely sorrowful” she fixed her eyes on the veil when “like a sudden twilight in the air, its terrors fell around her. She arose and stood trembling before him. ‘And do you feel it then, at last?’ said he mournfully.”¹¹ Had Elizabeth been awakened? Feeling the presence of a kindred soul, brimming with love for Elizabeth, yet still firm in his resolve to continue wearing the veil, Hooper could prevent his impulse to community from surfacing. During the interview he had spoken to his beloved with a remarkable degree of calmness. Now, for the first and only time, he cried passionately: “Have patience with me Elizabeth. … O! You know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil. Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity forever!”¹² (italics mine). These words could not have been uttered by Richard Digby, a rather one-dimensional Puritan, but only by one being pulled apart by the contrary implications of his theology and the simple needs of the human condition. Elizabeth asked him, much as Mary Goffe asked Digby, to lift the veil but once. By this time Hooper's passion having subsided and his impulse having been replaced by one perhaps more Puritan, he responded: “Never! It cannot be!”¹³ In spite of the exclamation points, he no longer cried with passion; he merely “replied” and then added a rueful smile which was to appear again and again in the tale. His devotion to his religious beliefs, his stifling of the familial impulse, was in the tradition of the New Light itinerants as related by Trumbull: Gilbert Tennent's itineracy “was a matter of great self-denial, to leave his family and people for so great a length of time.”¹⁴ For Hooper that time was eternity.

The rest of the story, though anti-climax, is instructive for a further glimpse into the clergyman's agony. “It grieved him, to the very depth of his kind heart, to observe how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest sports, while his melancholy figure was yet far off. Their instinctive dread caused him to feel more strongly than aught else, that a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape.”¹⁵ Unlike Digby, Hooper was aware of the awful price of his self-imposed separation. Although he stubbornly insisted that the veil should never be removed, he maintained a tenuous connection with humanity. “But still Mr. Hooper sadly smiled at the pale visages of the worldly throng as he passed by.”¹⁶ Ironically, the congregation called him “Father,” but the minister had consciously rejected parenthood by rejecting Elizabeth. He had similarly ceased to be an effective spiritual father to his flock, who seem most interested in him when on their deathbeds.

Finally, when Hooper died, the death scene is Hawthorne's criticism of the most sympathetic Puritan he had been able to devise. Hooper had focused on an undeniable truth—that man cannot know the innermost heart of his fellow man. This realization had compelled him, in spite of himself, toward solipsism. Though several persons sat in his death-chamber, “Natural connections he had none.”¹⁷ The simple message is that the man who separates himself from human love and sympathy, who severs his natural connections, is condemned to a life of woe. The attending physician was ironically described as unmoved, though he sought “only to mitigate the last pangs of the patient whom he could not save.”¹⁸ The use of theological language reminds us that the minister had not mitigated the pangs of his patients. Had he done only this he would have lived a far more useful life, at least in Hawthorne's terms. His own pains, too, would have been lighter. Hooper's nurse could not be described as unmoved. If the still-faithful Elizabeth did go through a conversion experience she was able to emerge from it without the solipsism that had enveloped her beloved. Hooper's chosen isolation had resulted in her involuntary solitude, but she had found it impossible to suppress her love. She was “one whose calm affection had endured thus long in secrecy, in solitude, amid the chill of age, and would not perish, even at the dying hours.”¹⁹

The truth that Hooper's veil has obscured is that his attribution of collective guilt has precluded individual responsibility. “When the friend shows his innermost heart to his friend; the lover to his beloved … then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I lived, and die!”²⁰ If Hooper thought he would be rewarded in heaven, Hawthorne hints that he was mistaken. The piece of crape still lay upon his face, “as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity.”²¹ Even after he has died and his face is dust, “awful is still the thought that it mouldered beneath the Black Veil,”²² still hidden from the sunshine.

Notes

1. Michael Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 68.

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Works, Vol. I, (Boston and N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1900), p. 40.

3. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

4. William Trumbull, History of Connecticut, Vol. II. (New Haven: Mattby, Goldsmith and Co. and Samuel Wadsworth, 1818), p. 134.

5. Hawthorne, Works, op. cit., p. 44.

6. Ibid., p. 45.

7. Trumbull, op. cit., p. 170.

8. Hawthorne, Works, op. cit., p. 46.

9. Ibid., p. 51.

10. Ibid., pp. 49-50.

11. Ibid., p. 54.

12. Ibid., pp. 54-55.

13. Ibid., p. 55.

14. Trumbull, op. cit., p. 243.

15. Hawthorne, Works, op. cit., p. 56.

16. Ibid., p. 57.

17. Ibid., p. 59.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 62.

21. Ibid., p. 59.

22. Ibid., p. 63.