Reverend Hooper, who mysteriously dons a black veil to the consternation of his congregation, has received unduly punitive treatment at the hands of some critics, while others have elevated him to patriarchal sainthood.¹ Richard Harter Fogle believes that Hooper is guilty of “perverse pride,” and is “sin-crazed”; William Bysshe Stein argues that Hooper is an “antichrist”; E. Earle Stibitz asserts that Hooper is “an unbalanced and unredeemed sinner”; and more recently, Michael J. Colacurcio, almost reluctantly, sees Hooper as a “sick-soul,” “sacrilegious,” “spiritually deranged and humanly out of control”—in short, “doomed.” At the opposite end of the spectrum Gilbert P. Voight compares Hooper to the “ancient Hebrew prophet[s]”; and similarly, Robert W. Cochran sees Hooper as “the instrument … the very voice of God.”²

In almost every instance the negative critical commentary derives from the conscious or subliminal acceptance of the narrator's tone. But the discourse of this story is without question ambiguous, the narrator of dubious reliability. It is, therefore, counterproductive to attempt the illumination of Hooper's character on a narrative basis. However, the critical polarity surrounding Hooper may be resolved through a close scrutiny of the veil as a “sign.”³ There is too startling a resemblance between the veiled Hooper and Moses to be ignored. That Hawthorne was deeply aware of the complexity of Moses as an archetypal character (both in the Old and New Testaments) has been amply demonstrated.⁴ It is with subtle perception of complex biblical issues that he fuses Moses with Christ, and the covenants of Law and of Grace (which they respectively represent) in the person of the veiled Hooper.

Hawthorne's narrator tells us that Hooper's veil is an “emblem”;⁵ Hooper tells Elizabeth that the veil is a “type and a symbol” (p. 46), but of what? What does Hooper's veil signify? The author's note confuses more than it elucidates in its provision of a pseudo-precedent. We are told that Joseph M. Moody historically veiled himself after having accidentally killed a friend. His veil is a symbol of regret and shame, one which “hid his face from men” (p. 37). Though the note tempts us to relate Hooper's veil to sin, it also clearly directs us away from such a conjecture, as it directs us away from any grounding historical source:⁶ “In Moody's case, however, the symbol had a different import,” we are told (p. 37, my emphasis).

In addition to the red-herring note, the language of the text resists easy compartmentalization. We are given questions without answers:

Did he seek to hide [his face] from the dread Being whom he was addressing?

(p. 39)

or else, the language equivocates:

Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister, as his black veil to them. (p. 39, my emphasis)

Hawthorne's celebrated ambiguity cries out for an external referent. And he has provided us with one in his allusive use of Moses and biblical veil imagery.

The superficial connection between Hooper and Moses is obvious: both are veiled figures. Moses dons his veil after speaking with God to conceal his shining face, which has frightened the unregenerate Israelites:

And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him. …

And till Moses had done speaking with them, he put a vail on his face. (Exodus 34:30, 33; King James Version)⁷

Similarly, Hawthorne's narrator tells us that “[a]sad smile gleamed faintly from beneath the black veil, and flickered about [Hooper's] mouth, glimmering as he disappeared” (p. 41). Hooper's veil, like Moses', conceals a face which “appeared like a faint glimmering of light” (p. 46).

If asserting a relationship between Hooper and Moses is valid, then an exploration of biblical veil imagery is necessary to yield a complete perception of Hooper's veil. Moses' veil—worn because he has spoken with and seen God, thereby alarming the Israelites—is a precursor of the veil that envelops the Holy of Holies: “And thou shalt put therein the ark of the testimony and cover the ark with the vail” (Exodus 40:3). Within this second veil is the ark, containing the law, and the mercy seat where God sits in judgment. No one of blemish can be admitted within the veil. The high priests (Aaron and his offspring) are admitted only on specified occasions, and then, only to bring the blood offering of an unblemished animal as an atonement for sin. The veil in this instance is of no particular value. It is what lies on either side of the veil that is important. The veil separates glory from corruption, life from death, splendor from squalor, the sacred from the profane. It is inviolable on pain of death:

And the Lord said unto Moses, Speak unto Aaron thy brother, that he come not at all times into the holy place within the vail before the mercy seat, which is upon the ark; that he die not: for I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat.

(Leviticus 16:2)

It is a recurring biblical refrain that in the presence of God's holiness, the corruptible cannot endure.

On one level, Hooper embodies the unremitting inflexibility of Old Testament Law. His voice speaks from within the veil of the Holy of Holies—the place of judgment. The paradoxical elements of tender mercy and inflexible judgment are united behind the veil:

I am bound to wear it ever, both in light and darkness, in solitude and before the gaze of multitudes, and as with strangers, so with my familiar friends. No mortal eye will see it withdrawn. This dismal shade must separate me from the world: even you, Elizabeth, can never come behind it!

(p. 46)

That this speech is addressed to Elizabeth, whose name means “she worships the Lord God,” adds to the poignancy of the unnavigable separation between God and man. Hooper, then, becomes the inviolable image of God, glimmering behind the veil, unable to admit blemished mortals.

In addition to the veil of Moses and the veil of the tabernacle, a third veil is spoken of: the metaphoric veil that hangs over the peoples' hearts. The verses of 2 Corinthians—as Stein, in his “The Parable of the Antichrist in “The Minister's Black Veil,”” so aptly observes—unite Moses with Christ, the covenant of Law with the covenant of Grace, in what seems to be a contrasting comparison:⁸

But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away:

How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious? …

For if that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious.

Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech: And not as Moses which put a vail over his face, that the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that which is abolished:

But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which vail is done away in Christ.

But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart.

(2 Corinthians 3:7, 8, 11-15)

This is the veil of which Hooper exclaims, “I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!” This is the veil which cannot be removed, “On Earth, never!” (p. 39). Contrary to Stein's reading of the Pauline verses, it is the continuity not the contrast of the Old and New Testaments that is revealed. The “glorious” message given to Moses was the Law. The ten commandments, graven in stone, meant an end to moral chaos—that is why judgment must be perceived as a mercy and not a cruelty. But the covenant of Law is only fulfilled in Christ, who becomes the final, ultimate object of judgment. This is the glory that causes Moses' face to shine, and which the Israelites are unable to see. Moses' veil symbolically points to the unseen salvation of Christ.

Hooper's veil, like Moses', also implies Christ. The veil that hangs over the heart cannot be lifted other than by God's gracious hand. Christ is the unblemished high priest, the spotless lamb, the interstice between Mankind and the Holy of Holies. He does not do away with the Mosaic Law, but completes it:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.

(Matthew 5:17)

Finally, Christ's body is the torn veil that permits access to God “by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the vail, that is to say, his flesh. …” (Hebrews 10:20)⁹ There are, then, four uses of the veil in the Bible: Moses' veil conceals God's glory, the veil separates man from the Holy of Holies, it metaphorically hangs in the hearts of the unregenerate, and Christ's body is the torn veil. At the moment of his death, the veil of the tabernacle is rent, symbolizing man's access to the Holy of Holies through Christ. Thus to reject Christ is to place the veil in one's heart.

The veil, hanging in the hearts of the people, obscuring Christ from their vision, has become (for Hooper) an “objective correlative” for Christ, which he wears as a garment of righteousness. What seems to be perversity in his not allowing it to be removed becomes an expression of his identity with Christ. Hooper's smile behind the veil, always associated with faint light, recalls Moses' fading splendor which prepares the way for Christ's permanent splendor. The link is even more compelling when one remembers that Hawthorne subtitled “The Minister's Black Veil” “A Parable,” associating it clearly with the New Testament parables of Christ.

The reading I am suggesting enables us to view the funeral and marriage scenes from an entirely different perspective than the gloom-doom-secret-sin approach that has dominated criticism of “The Minister's Black Veil.” In the funeral episode we are given the image of the dead girl's corpse shuddering at the disclosure of Hooper's features. Poe, in his review of this story, asserted that Hooper had committed a “crime of dark dye” against the dead girl; most of the critics agree with this reading, if not in letter, in spirit.¹⁰

[T]he bell tolled for the funeral of a young lady. The relatives and friends were assembled in the house, and the more distant acquaintances stood about the door, speaking of the good qualities of the deceased, when their talk was interrupted by the appearance of Mr. Hooper … The clergyman stepped into the room where the corpse was laid, and bent over the coffin, to take a last farewell of his deceased parishioner. … A person who watched the interview between the dead and living, scrupled not to affirm, that, at the instant when the clergyman's features were disclosed, the corpse had slightly shuddered, rustling the shroud and muslin cap.

(p. 42)

The diffident quality of the “mourners,” casually discussing the dead girl's “good qualities,” recalls the “minstrels and the people making a noise” in the funeral episode of Matthew 9:23-26, which Christ interrupts. In the biblical incident, Christ asserts that the child “is not dead, but sleepeth” (Matthew 9:24). He then takes her by the hand, and she arises. Correspondingly, we are given the image of the minister and the dead girl's spirit “walking hand in hand” (p. 42). This image of life and grace in death tempers the previous shuddering of the dead girl's corpse. It qualifies the scene, transforming the sinister into the mysterious, replete with “the music of a heavenly harp, swept by the fingers of the dead … heard among the saddest accents of the minister” (p. 42). The funeral procession becomes an image of new life.

The funeral scene metamorphoses into the marriage scene. Again, our reader expectation is overturned as the marriage feast, ordinarily a joyful occasion, is presented to us in images of death. The dead girl has returned from the grave to be married. Her “cold fingers” and her “death-like paleness” give us a different perception from that of the funeral episode. There we were given a picture of life and release through death. In the companion scene of the wedding we are shown death in life.¹¹ The appearance of joy is revealed as a grim and anxious nightmare. Hooper, aware of the disparity of life that consists of spiritual death, sees himself “in a glass darkly,” as it were, and is unable to participate in the hollow joy of the wedding: “Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18), Hooper flees the room. He is at once the cause and effect of truth:

[T]he black veil involved his own spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed all others. His frame shuddered—his lips grew white—he spilt the untasted wine upon the carpet—and rushed forth into the darkness. For the Earth, too, had on her Black Veil.

(pp. 43-4)

Hooper as a Christ figure parallels the Passion of Christ.¹² The language of this episode is imbued with last supper and crucifixion imagery. Hooper's spilt wine alludes to Christ's refusal of galled wine as he hung upon the cross. This occurs following Christ's oath not to taste wine “until [he] drink it anew … in [his] Father's kingdom” (Matthew 26:29). The Earth's Black Veil, Hooper's shuddering frame, his white lips, all invoke the tenor of the crucifixion scene, “when there was a darkness over the whole earth” (Luke 23:44).

The “fearful secret” (p. 45) of the veil is that it points to the profound necessity of Christ. This is not to say, precisely, that it is a symbol of sin. Sin is not the truth of which the veil is an outward symbol. The veil is the manifestation of Christ's efficacy over sin, of man's urgent need of that efficacy, and of the perilous future without Christ's efficacy.

Hooper chooses the outward veil, signifying Christ, as opposed to the inward veil of separation from Christ. In choosing to veil his face, he removes the veil from his heart. At his deathbed Hooper is attended by Elizabeth (remember the meaning of her name). She is the only person who understands the significance of the veil and endorses its meaning. Her relationship to Hooper has become redefined: she is “wed” to him in the sense that the believer is the “bride of Christ.” And as such, she insures that the veil remains in place (p. 51).

Our final vision of Hooper (Father Hooper) is as a kind of Suffering Servant. Isaiah 53 contains a prophetic messianic image of which Christ claims to be the fulfillment. The Israelites of the Isaiah passage, with their veiled hearts, have despised and rejected the Suffering Servant and “esteemed him not … yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” How like Father Hooper this sounds:

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.

(p. 49)

“A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” one might add. The style of the narration here recalls the Isaiah passage, as does the content—it is one of the few moments when the narrative tone is in sync with the “signs.”

But much of the narrative tone is at odds with the symbols of “The Minister's Black Veil.” The narration is almost the dismal cataloguing of some incidents in which Hooper figures prominently. But what the narrator points to symbolically is precisely that which he himself stands in such desperate need of. Hooper's veil is, as Carnochan has observed, the embodiment of both “concealment” and “revelation.”¹³ What Hawthorne subtly reveals to the reader, he withholds from the characters that people his story, including the narrator. While keeping the veil firmly in place over the hearts of the parishioners, he removes the veil from our eyes. He forces us to see what the community of “The Minister's Black Veil” (for which the narrator speaks) refuses to see: that we are mortal in body, and that the province of our souls is governed, either by God's mercy, or his judgment.¹⁴ The final sentence of “The Minister's Black Veil” characteristically reveals to us, in terms of “signs,” what it conceals from the narrator and congregation:

The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial stone is moss grown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the thought, that it mouldered beneath the black veil!

(pp. 52-3)

The narrator's veiled heart does not understand the import of Hooper's veil; he sees only the physical decay, the mouldering of the body, the turning to dust that death brings. He has no vision, as Hooper certainly had, of life beyond this mortal “veil of tears.” Therefore, Hooper's life of sacrifice and alienation is, for the narrator, one of senseless deprivation whose only reward is the horror of death.

Yet, submerged within the image of the withering grass of this last sentence is what might be interpreted as a warning or a promise, depending on which veil one chooses:

All flesh is grass. … The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.

(Isaiah 40:6-8)

The word of God in the Old Testament is the Law; in the New Testament, Christ is the Word. Though Hooper is gone, the veil—signifying God's covenant—remains.

Millicent Bell in her “The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter” refers to Hawthorne's “primary preoccupation with the rendering of reality into a system of signs.”¹⁵ And Benita Moore's article, “Hawthorne, Heidegger, and the Holy,” contends essentially that Hawthorne “says” by not saying, indicating a reluctance to subvert “truth” with the inadequacies of language;¹⁶ and Hawthorne himself in the “Preface” to The House of Seven Gables decries a too direct approach to specifying truth as “… sticking a pin through a butterfly—thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.”¹⁷ It is as if Hawthorne sees existence as indeterminate, an already subjectively interpretive narrative effort; and to attain any sort of “truth,” he must resort to the transcendent meanings of signs. But the signs are always given through a fallible human voice that, despite its intended objectivity, is necessarily hermeneutical. The greatness of Hawthorne is that he allows/forces us to participate in and expand upon this interpretive effort.

Notes

1. For negative treatment of Hooper and his veil, see Richard Harter Fogle's “An Ambiguity of Sin or Sorrow,” in New England Quarterly, 12 (1948), 342-349; William Bysshe Stein's “The Parable of the Antichrist in ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in American Literature, 27 (1955), 386-392; E. Earle Stibitz’ “Ironic Unity in Hawthorne's ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in American Literature, 34 (1962), 182-190; and Michael J. Colacurcio's “Parson Hooper's Power of Blackness: Sin and Self in ‘The Minister's Black Veil’” in Prospects: An Annual of American Culture Studies, 5 (1980), 331-411. For a positive view, see Gilbert P. Voight's “The Meaning of ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in College English, 13 (1952), 337-338; and Robert W. Cochran's “Hawthorne's Choice: The Veil or the Jaundiced Eye,” in College English, 23 (1962), 342-346. Voight's article in which he discusses Jeremiah's yoke, Ezekiel's shaven face, and Hosea's marriage to a prostitute as signs for the Israelites provided the inspiration for my essay, tracing Hooper's resemblance to Moses.

2. Fogle, p. 343; Stein, p. 391; Stibitz, p. 188; Colacurcio, pp. 347, 354, 361, 398; Voight, p. 338; Cochran, p. 345.

3. See W. B. Carnochan's “‘The Minister's Black Veil’: Symbol, Meaning, and the Context of Hawthorne's Art” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 24 (1969), 182-192; and Mellicent Bell's “The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter” in Massachusetts Review (Spring 1982), 9-26. These two articles deal (though in a very different manner from that which I intend) with the pre-eminence of signs in a critical scrutiny of Hawthorne's works.

4. See Ely Stock's “History and the Bible in Hawthorne's ‘Roger Malvin's Burial,’” in Essex Institute Historical Collections, 100 (1964), 279-296; and Burton J. Fishman's “Imagined Redemption in ‘Roger Malvin's Burial,’” in Studies in American Fiction, 5 (1977), 257-262.

5. “The Minister's Black Veil” text is from The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice Told Tales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 42. [ … ]

6. Michael J. Colacurcio's article “Parson Hooper's Power of Blackness” is an impressive piece of scholarship that takes great pains to place Hooper in an historical-puritan context. Though I greatly admire the detail of this work and find it full of valuable incidental information, I think that his effort to impose an almost scientific vision of historical “fact” on what he admits is an ambiguous discourse is a house divided.

7. All subsequent biblical references are from the King James Version, hereafter included parenthetically in the text.

8. See Stein for a carefully constructed argument that asserts a relationship between Moses and Hooper. Stein, however, assigns a negative value to this relationship. He dichotomizes Law and Grace, identifies Hooper with Moses and the Law, and dismisses him as an “antichrist.” Biblically, however, Law and Grace are not mutually exclusive, but continuous. They are united as surely as Hooper and his veil. Stein's article, therefore, is an intriguing, but harsh misreading of “The Minister's Black Veil.”

9. For additional verses that demonstrate the continuity of Law and Grace, of Old and New Testaments, see Galations 3:24; Romans 7:7, 12, 13; Romans 10:4; Hebrews 9:11. Stein's argument fails to see 2 Corinthians in the context of these verses. Hawthorne, I think, was more eclectic.

10. See Carnochan's “‘The Minister's Black Veil’: Symbol, Meaning, and the Context of Hawthorne's Art,” p. 183, n. 4. For specific agreement see Stibitz’ “Ironic Unity in Hawthorne's ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” p. 183. For articles that stress Hooper in generally negative terms, see my first note. Also, Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) for a psycho-sexual reading. Crews maintains that Hooper dons the black veil so he won't have to marry Elizabeth (p. 108). Also, see John H. Timmerman's “Hawthorne's ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in Explicator 41 (1983), 29-30; Timmerman contends that Hooper is one of Hawthorne's “arch villains,” in the tradition of “Chillingsworth” [sic].

11. See Raymond Benoit's “Hawthorne's Psychology of Death: ‘The Minister's Black Veil’” in Studies in Short Fiction, 8 (1971), 553-560. Benoit suggests that because Hooper has faced death, he can live, his parishioners cannot really live because they refuse to acknowledge death.

12. See Michael J. Colacurcio's “Parson Hooper's Power of Blackness” pp. 353-4 for a diametrically opposed argument that treats Hooper's wedding actions as “sacrilegious.”

13. Carnochan, “Symbol, Meaning and the Context of Hawthorne's Art,” p. 186.

14. See Colacurcio's thorough exploration of sin. He is particularly good in presenting Hooper as someone who has the quintessential revelation of the breadth, depth, subtlety and complexity of sin.

15. Bell, “The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter,” p. 9.

16. Benita Moore, “Hawthorne, Heidegger, and the Holy: The Uses of Literature,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 64 (1981), 170-196.

17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables, Vol. 2 of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), p. 2.