The deliberate ambiguity of style and symbol in Hawthorne's tales provides a rich mine for criticism, but it can beguile us into assuming there is only one lode to the mine. Critics of “The Minister's Black Veil” have tended to become so preoccupied with the resonance of the most immediate ambiguity—that of the veil itself—that other elements in the story, most notably the handling of the secondary characters, have been neglected.

Certainly the ambiguity of the veil is central; but it has by now been fully explored. The critical debate surrounding it is too well-known to need repetition here.¹ Suffice it to say that the mainstream of the argument has moved, in logical sequence, from one polarity (seeing the veil as an honestly-accepted symbol of human limitations, and Mr. Hooper thus as an Everyman figure, humbly embodying the fate of all of us who must see life through a veil darkly) to the other polarity (seeing the veil as a truth distorted into an absolute, a symbol of spiritual pride and deliberate self-isolation, with Mr. Hooper thus in a Faust role). And the debate has finally come to an equally logical resolution. E. Earle Stibitz,² building on R. H. Fogle's idea that the veil in fact embraces both polarities, argued cogently for the ironic interplay of the two levels of meaning; while W. B. Carnochan,³ in a brilliant essay, analyzed the essentially literary nature of the symbol, its resistance to reduction into explicit “meanings,” its paradoxical embodiment of both “concealment” and “revelation.” Surely little more can be said about this. Modern readers can take for granted that Hawthorne's best symbols work very much in the manner of Keats' negative capability, preventing the reader from any “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” They dramatize not only Hawthorne's distrust of moral certainties, but also his sense of their artistic bankruptcy.

All this is valuable, and central, to an understanding of “The Minister's Black Veil.” Yet in nearly all the criticism relating to the story the emphasis has remained on Mr. Hooper and the veil. There has been little exploration of how the moral compass extends to other elements in the story, especially to all the non-veiled characters. But Hawthorne, as usual, is hedging more than one bet in this tale. Throughout the deft juxtapositions of structure and style, the ambiguous veil is used as a catalyst by which other moral and perceptual values are examined.⁴

The fact that Hawthorne intended the moral scrutiny of his story to be directed as much toward the attitudes of the other characters as toward Mr. Hooper's is suggested by the very structure of the tale. In the opening tableau the camera pans, as it were, a cross-section of the congregation (“sexton,” “old people,” “children,” “parents,” “spruce bachelors,” “pretty maidens,”) before it focuses on the entry of Mr. Hooper. In the closing scene, Mr. Hooper's attitude is once more established in terms of dramatic contrast—this time with that of the “young and zealous divine,” the Reverend Mr. Clark, whose arguments for the removal of the veil encapsulate most of those used by various people throughout the story (simple curiosity, personal uneasiness, the appeal to a sense of clerical propriety, the assumption of a “horrible crime”). In between these two set-pieces, the narrative is carefully modulated between dramatic incidents involving Mr. Hooper's veil and accounts of the reactions of the congregation to it. After the initial paragraph presenting the range of characters involved in this dialectic, the first conversation is centered on their reactions to the yet-unnamed phenomenon. This then is followed by the narrator's filling us in on “the cause of so much amazement,” which, he notes, “may appear sufficiently slight.” After this explanatory paragraph, the story reverts to the popular reactions. Then the account of the sermon, followed yet once more by an account of the popular reactions. And so on. The reverting to the effect of the veil is more constant than a leit motif; it is part of a carefully-controlled juxtaposition that tightens and extends the dramatic ambiguities of the tale.

“The Minister's Black Veil” is an interesting variation on Hawthorne's theme of spiritual isolation. The isolation of Ethan Brand or Goodman Brown is clearly their responsibility, their “unpardonable sin.” But if Mr. Hooper is shown as isolated from the members of his congregation, the fault would seem to rest at least as much with them as with him. Throughout the tale, Hawthorne presents a wide range of attitudes in relation to the veil; but what unifies them all is a refusal, or an inability, to accept Mr. Hooper's acceptance of it. Three people, including Elizabeth, speculate that it is a sign of madness; others see it “a confession of dark crimes.” Some “sagacious heads” presume to be able to “penetrate the mystery”; others declare there is “no mystery at all.” Yet all agree that “he has changed himself into something awful only by hiding his face.” Their reactions are ones of “dread” and “horror,” and they are all “conscious of lighter spirits the moment they [lose] sight of the black veil.” There is nothing in Mr. Hooper's manner or actions (“nodding kindly to … his parishioners,” full of “friendly courtesy,” “kind and loving”) to isolate them. What does so is the projection of their own fears and their own imaginative blindness. Their reactions run a gamut from pettiness to positive cruelty: the excessive propriety of “more than one woman of delicate nerves [who] was forced to leave the meetinghouse”; the comic embarrassment of the “deputation;” the viciousness of those who “made it a point of hardihood to throw themselves in his way”; the superstitiousness which claimed that “ghost and fiend consorted with him”; the general lack of charity that kept him “a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish.” Evil indeed is in the eye of the beholder. If the final paragraph of the tale is essentially negative in its language, it is so not only at the expense of Mr. Hooper. He has been very largely the scapegoat for a conventional morality that could not tolerate the existence of a public conscience.

In this connection, Elizabeth, usually seen as the only affirmative figure in the tale, and as thus marking the extent of Hooper's culpable isolation, becomes herself culpable; at least until the end, she is incapable of the ultimate trust or love required to see in the veil the human reality beyond the symbolic one, although as Mr. Hooper's “plighted wife” she is in the best position to do so. That Hawthorne's attitude to her is more ambiguous than has generally been supposed is seen in the language of the crucial scene between the plighted lovers and by the self-contradictions of her own reasoning. Although she is described as being able to discern in the veil “nothing of the dreadful gloom that had so overawed the multitude,” and although she had herself declared to him “there is nothing terrible in this piece of crape except that it hides a face which I am always glad to look upon,” she nevertheless, with “calm energy,” “determines to chase away the strange cloud,” with which the black veil had “impressed all beside herself.” There is a brisk intractability reflected in the language and the syntax here. (“As his plighted wife, it should be her privilege … ;” “At the Minister's first visit, therefore …”). The “calm energy” seems an obstinate determination that her will shall prevail, though the stakes, as she herself has acknowledged, are not high. In the face of his refusal to succumb to her persuasions, her arguments change radically. From her initial acceptance of the veil as “but a double fold of crape,” she moves quickly through interpreting it as a token of some “grievous affliction,” to an imputation of scandal (“there may be whispers that you hide your face under the consciousness of secret sin”), to seeing it as “perhaps a symptom of mental disease,” until finally its “terrors” have been transferred to her. Throughout all these attempts to force Mr. Hooper to place a literal meaning on what he had chosen to describe as “a type and a symbol,” his replies, couched as they are in terms of deliberate equivocation (“If it be a sign of mourning … I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil. … If I hide my face for sorrow, there is cause enough … and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal man might not do the same?”) recall Christ's “render to Caesar” answer when men of bad faith sought to trap him into literalizing a symbol. Finally, though her lover cries “passionately” to her out of his “miserable obscurity” not to desert him in his fear and loneliness, she presents him with an ultimatum, the cold simplicity of which is a measure of her moral imagination at this stage: “‘Lift the veil but once and look me in the face,’ said she. ‘Never! It cannot be!’ replied Mr. Hooper. ‘Then, farewell!’ said Elizabeth.”

Throughout the story, then, Hawthorne builds up a composite picture of the parishioners' responses to the veil, which acts as one side of the dialectical tension on which the story is structured. The dialectic is epitomized by the parallelism of syntax in the final summing-up of Mr. Hooper's life: “In this manner, Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish.” The contrast is one between moral attitudes (the minister's kindliness and the parishioners' uncharitable suspicions) and, more importantly, between modes of perception (Mr. Hooper's sense of the symbol as too complex to be able to explain, and the parishioners' literal-mindedness).

Yet Hawthorne is not as unequivocal toward the congregation as the above argument might suggest. The writer who refused to see one-dimensionally even the Puritans condemning Hester Prynne does not render this tale melodramatic by over-simplifying either one of his dramatic polarities. Both his moral and his artistic judgment forbade such glibness. The same ambivalence that surrounds Mr. Hooper in the story also encompasses those who oppose him.

Three factors modify our judgment of Mr. Hooper's judges. One is the narrative style used to describe them. Throughout most of the story this remains jocular, detached, fending off serious criticism. With something of the same authorial facetiousness as in the preamble to “Rappacini's Daughter,” Hawthorne even manages to incorporate a mention of his own wedding-knell story. The opening paragraph sets the parishioners in stereotyped roles from which little individuality could be expected: the old people are “stooping,” the children are “tripping merrily,” the “spruce bachelors” are looking sidelong at the “pretty maidens.” The insistence on words such as “seem,” “appear,” “semblance,” assumes their angle of vision, and serves to rationalize their morality of appearances. What W. B. Carnochan has called the “Hawthornian business of false leads and doubtful clarifications” operates in their favor: the rhetorical questions (“Could Mr. Hooper be fearful of her glance, that he so hastily caught back the black veil?”) promote their point of view, and the explanations of conduct (“Old Squire Saunders, doubtless by an accidental lapse of memory, neglected. …”) give them the benefit of the doubt. The style reaches a level of comic burlesque in the description of the “deputation” sent to confront Mr. Hooper. For all their scandal-mongering and their imaginative shallowness, then, Hawthorne's style acts as a brake on the reader's judgment of them. Its gentle distancing is a paradigm of the faint smile with which Mr. Hooper acknowledges the limitations of the human imagination in encompassing his own dark world.

Secondly, the wedding scene in which the minister accidentally catches a glimpse of his veiled face in the looking glass, and rushes out horrified into the night, tends to endorse the judgment of the parishioners. If he henceforth “never willingly passed before a mirror, nor stooped to drink at a still fountain, lest in its peaceful bosom he should be affrighted by himself,” who can blame his parishioners for their inability to see beyond the external emblem? Once again the detail breaks up any over-simplified division of sympathies. As if to highlight the fact that questions of perception, and of appearance and reality are at the heart of this tale, the mirror image is a recurrent one. The minister avoids the literal reflection of the looking glass. The “imitative little imp” who covered his face with a black handkerchief in mimicry of Mr. Hooper and almost lost his own wits by the panic he created in his playmates carries the mirror image one step further: he is the reflector reflected, two steps removed from reality, caught in the trap of appearances. The faces peering at Mr. Hooper from behind the tombstones form a more surrealistic kind of mirror which encompasses a double reflection: while they are trying simply to mock the minister they are indeed the “stare of the dead people.” Finally, on his deathbed, Mr. Hooper conjures up an ideal world, without veils, where appearance and reality are one: “When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin. …”

The third element in the story that works to modify our judgment of those who stand in opposition to Mr. Hooper is that Elizabeth, the character who most represents the limitations of their understanding at the beginning, is redeemed at the end. It is she who, if the veil had fallen on his deathbed, would “with averted eyes” have “covered that aged face.” Her “calm affection” has no egotism left in it, and her willingness to accept the minister now on his own terms suggests a growth in both faith and love. She is still, of course, the loser—for this story of human limitations can have no winners. But her position at the end—neither that of the wilful and insistent Mr. Clark, whom she had resembled earlier in the story, nor that of the detached physician “decorously grave though unmoved”—suggests a middle way, an acceptance of all that the veil represents and an ability to grow in spite of this.

The ambiguities of “The Minister's Black Veil” thus extend beyond Mr. Hooper and the veil to the other characters in the story, beyond the symbol itself to the perceiving eyes. If the veil manages to incorporate the paradox of Mr. Hooper's role in the story—so that he is simultaneously Everyman and Faust—it also focuses the paradox implied in the outsiders' perspective: the limitations of their judgments, but also the understandable humanness of them. They form a backdrop of ordinary reality against which the symbolic meaning can be most resonantly played. Within the commonsense framework the most affirmative character of the story finds her growth and self-acceptance.

Notes

1. Good accounts of the history of the critical debate on this story are given in E. Earle Stibitz, “Ironic Unity in Hawthorne's ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” American Literature, 34 (May, 1962), 182-190, and W. B. Carnochan, “The Minister's Black Veil,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 24 (Sept. 1969), 182-192.

2. E. Earle Stibitz.

3. W. B. Carnochan.

4. One excellent article which does explore the role of Mr. Hooper's congregation is that of Raymond Benoit, “Hawthone's Psychology of Death: ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 8 (Fall 1971), 553-560. Benoit was the first to explore in detail Hawthorne's negative attitude to Mr. Hooper's parishioners; the present article is largely an extension of his. But he sees the attitude as wholly negative, and reads the story in existential terms: Mr. Hooper having learned to live life because he has seen and accepted the anguish of death, while the parishioners live only half-lives, unable to accept the realization of death as an individual destiny.