have a scriptural or institutional precedent that may be more helpful than the factual one suggested by the footnote. And indeed the Bible seems to suggest several possibilities.⁵

When Moses returns to the children of Israel after spending forty days and forty nights in the presence of God "the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him" (Exodus 34:30) until Moses "put a vail on his face" (Exodus 34:33), a "vail" that he removes when he enters the tabernacle to speak with the Lord. This act of veiling, like that of the Reverend Mr. Hooper, becomes the object of an elaborate figural reading, as in Paul's letters to the Corinthians.

But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly 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 steadfastly 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.

Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away.

Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

II Corinthians 3:7-18

This passage concludes the complex figure of reading and writing that structures the third chapter of II Corinthians, a figure that turns on the distinction between the spirit and the letter: "Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God; and not in tables of stone, but in the fleshy tables of the heart" (3:3). According to a nineteenth-century commentary of the sort Hawthorne would have known, St. Paul was the

ministering pen or other instrument of writing as well as the ministering bearer and presenter of the letter. "Not with ink" stands in contrast to the letters of commendation which "some" at Corinth (v. 1) used. Ink is also used here to include all outward materials for writing, such as the Sinaitic tables of stone were. These, however were not written with ink, but "graven" by the "finger of God" (Exodus 31.18; 32.16). Christ's epistle (his believing members converted by St. Paul) is better still: it is written not merely with the finger, but with the "Spirit of the Living God, " it is not the "ministration of death" as the law, but the "living Spirit" that "giveth life."⁶

Paul contrasts the clearness and fearlesness of the Apostolic teachings with the concealment and indirection of the Old Testament. And in doing so he

passes from the literal fact to the truth symbolized by it, the blindness of Jews and Judaizers to the ultimate end of the law: stating that Moses put on the veil that they might not look steadfastly at (Romans 10.4) the end of that (law) which (like Moses' glory) is done away. Not that Moses had this purpose; but often God attributes to His prophets the purpose which he has himself. Because the Jews would not see, God judicially gave them up so as not to see. The glory of Moses' face is antitypically Christ's glory shining behind the veil of legal ordinances. The veil which has been taken off to the believer is left on to the unbelieving Jew, so that he should not see…. He stops short at the letter of the law, not seeing the end of it. The evangelical glory of the law, like the shining of Moses' face, cannot be borne by a camal people, and therefore remains veiled to them until the spirit come to take away the veil. (Jamieson, vol. 2, p. 305)

And when that occurs "Christians, a contrasted with the Jews who have a veil on their hearts, answering to Moses' veil on his face," will stand with open face "changed into His image by beholding Him" (Jamieson, vol. 2, p. 305).

As this commentary suggests, figural reading such as Paul's is itself a form of veiling that requires in its turn careful interpretation. When he figures himself as an instrument of writing and the lives of his converts as epistles from Christ able to be read by all men, he is speaking parabolically, and the parables in both the Old and New Testaments are dark sayings where one thing is expressed in terms of something else so that it demands attention and insight, sometimes an actual explanation (Smith, vol. 3, p. 2328). Associated with the dark sayings of rabbinic teachings, parables are linked with those things "darkly announced under the ancient economy, and during that period darkly understood, but fully published under the Gospel" (Jamieson, vol. 2, p. 43). But Christ's decision to adopt the parabolic mode complicates this distinction by calling attention to the generic resemblance between the form of his teaching and that of the rabbis.

The parable was made the intrument for teaching the young disciple to discern the treasures of wisdom of which the "accursed multitude" was ignorant. The teaching of our Lord at the commencement of his ministry was, in every way, the opposite of this. The Sermon on the Mount may be taken as the type of the "words of Grace" which he spake, "not as the scribes." Beatitudes, laws, promises were uttered distinctly, not indeed without similitudes, but with similitudes that explained themselves. So for some months he taught in synagogues and on the sea-shore of Galilee, as he had before taught in Jerusalem, and as yet without a parable. But then there comes a change. His direct teaching was met with scorn, unbelief, hardness, and He seems for a time to abandon it for that which took the form of parables. The question of the disciples (Matt. xiii. 10) implies that they were astonished. Their master was no longer proclaiming the Gospel of the kingdom as before. He was failing back into one at least of the forms of Rabbinic teaching…. He was speaking to the multitude in the parables and dark sayings which the Rabbis reserved for their chosen disciples…. He had chosen this form of teaching because the people were spiritually blind and deaf … and in order that they might remain so…. Men have set themselves against the truth, and therefore it is hid from their eyes, presented to them in forms in which it is not easy for them to recognize it. To the inner circle of the chosen it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God. To those who are without, all these things are done in parables. (Smith, vol. 3, pp. 2328-9)

Biblical parables, in short, are veils that serve the double purpose of revealing and concealing, making manifest through their figural drapery and mysteries of the kingdom to those capable of knowing and relishing them and providing some temporary fictitious entertainment to those insensible to spiritual things. In this sense, parabolic, figurative language like the "double VEIL" that shrouds the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle, is a "dread symbol of separation between God and guilty men" (Jamieson, vol. 2, p. 61). It withdraws the light from those who love darkness and protects the truth from scoffers, but through the process of interpretation offers the possibility of direct access to divine presence. Those "who ask the meaning of the parable, will not rest till the teacher has explained it, are led step by step to the laws of interpretation, so that they can understand all parables, and then pass into the higher region in which parables are no longer necessary, but all things are spoken plainly" (Smith, vol. 3, p. 2329).

This happy crossing between literal and figural, between seeing and being, between the Old and the New Testaments, that the biblical text enacts is short-circuited in Hawthorne's parable which dramatizes a collision between literal reference and illustrative significance. The story opens with a description of communal life in a "real" town (Milford, Connecticut) where there seems to be a perfect solidarity of signs and meanings.

The sexton stood in the porch of Milford meeting-house, pulling lustily at the bell-rope. The old people of the village came stooping along the street. Children, with bright faces, tript merrily beside their parents, or mimicked a graver gait, in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at pretty maidens, and fancied that the Sabbath sunshine made them prettier than on week-days. When the throng had mostly streamed into the porch, the sexton began to toll the bell, keeping his eye on the Reverend Mr. Hooper's door. The first glimpse of the clergyman's figure was the signal for the bell to cease its summons. (371)

Here is a world characterized by its smooth, untroubled surface, the result of the easy familiarity of the happily conventional, a world whose contents may be assumed to be unambiguously given. The behavior of the people is as natural and fitting as the sunshine that illuminates their faces; and the figure of their clergyman whose arrival they await seems equally to confirm the shared awareness of a given, common humanity. A "gentlemanly person … dressed with due clerical neatness," he is, with one exception, entirely unremarkable. But that "one thing remarkable in his appearance" is enough to disturb the untroubled surface of the community by making him "strange" (371) and "unaccountable" (372). He has put on a black veil that seems to consist of "two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, farther than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things" (372). The most immediate and drastic effects of this "simple piece of crape" (373), however, have nothing to do with the way it changes the minister's view of the world. Rather they result from the fact that it defamiliarizes him for his parishioners: '"I can't really feel as if good Mr. Hooper's face was behind that piece of crape,' said the sexton. 'I don't like it,' muttered an old woman, as she hobbled into the meeting-house. 'He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face'" (372).

"How strange," said a lady, "that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper's face!" "Something must surely be amiss with Mr. Hooper's intellects," observed her husband…. "But the strangest part of the affair is the effect of this vagary even on a soberminded man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's face, throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghostlike from head to foot." (374)

Apparently the "horrible black veil['s]" (376) awful "influence" (374) derives from the fact that, in covering the face, it radically disfigures or defaces, making the minister an object of both morbid, idle curiosity and peculiar dread.

His converts always regarded him with a dread peculiar to themselves, affirming, though but figuratively, that, before he brought them to celestial light, they had been with him behind the black veil…. Dying sinners cried aloud for Mr. Hooper, and would not yield their breath till he appeared; though ever, as he stooped to whisper consolation, they shuddered at the veiled face so near their own. Such were the terrors of the black veil, even when Death had bared his visage! Strangers came long distances to attend service at his church, with the mere idle curiosity of gazing at his figure, because it was forbidden them to behold his face. (381)

The effect of the veil is to make Hooper visible as being veiled, to substitute for a "face to face" (373) relationship one where the other is perceived "through a glass, darkly" (I Corinthians 13:12) or engimatically, that is to say, figuratively. On the one hand the story insists on the literalness of the veil, that it is simply a physical object (one "cause" of Hooper's sad, ironic smile is the recognition that "only a material emblem had separated him from happiness" [379-80]) whereas on the other, as the above passage suggests, it becomes a figure for trope itself. Once Hooper uses it to cover his face the double piece of crape can never again be simply its innocent existential self, for as a covering it becomes part of a system of preestablished relationships, a system of figures invoked by the story's subtitle, which points us to a world where material objects stand for something other than themselves. When his coverts assert "though but figuratively" that they have been behind the black veil they point to the process of comparison and substitution, the chain of figures, that controls a system of representation. Or to put the point another way: In the act of veiling his own face Hooper reminds us of the ways in which we give a face even to mute and senseless "Death" by incorporating it into the metaphoric chain of veiling and unveiling that energizes the story.

Indeed one could say that the veiled Hooper (a disfigured figure) is an uncanny appearance, in the real world, of a figure, and as such he disturbs the normal assumptions that govern the relationship between the literal and figural. The initial effect of his veiled figure is to confuse, destabilize, and obscure. There is a "rustling" and "shuffling" among his congregation "greatly at variance with that hushed repose which should attend the entrance of the minister," and the veil throws its "obscurity between him and the holy page, as he read the Scriptures" (373). "A subtle power was breathed into his words" (373), but it is a power that darkens rather than enlightens. "The people trembled, though they but darkly understood him, when he prayed that they, and himself, and all of mortal race, might be ready, as he trusted this young maiden had been, for the dreadful hour that should snatch the veil from their faces" (375). Hooper is speaking figuratively here and doing so within a well established scriptural tradition, but the literal veil that covers his face prevents a traditional, untroubled response to his words. And his parishioners' reaction is echoed by the reader's when Hooper on his death bed "snatched both his hands from beneath the bed-clothes, and pressed them strongly on the black veil" in response to Reverend Mr. Clark's plea: "'Before the veil of eternity be lifted, let me cast aside this black veil from your face'" (383). In these two examples the relationship between the literal and figural veils, as well as that between the acts of "snatching," is not a symmetrical one, and the lack of symmetry obscures the meaning of both even as it encourages further figuration. Plain, unadorned, nonfigurative speech becomes impossible—" It was remarkable that, of all the busy-bodies and impertinent people in the parish, not one ventured to put the plain question to Mr. Hooper wherefore he did this thing" (377)—even between the Reverend Hooper and his "plighted wife" (378).

"No," said she aloud, and smiling, "there is nothing terrible in this piece of crape, except that it hides a face which I am always glad to look upon. Come, good sir, let the sun shine from behind the cloud. First lay aside your black veil: then tell me why you put it on."

Mr Hooper's smile glimmered faintly.

"There is an hour to come," said he, "when all of us shall cast aside our veils. Take it not amiss, beloved friend, if I wear this piece of crape till then."

"Your words are a mystery too," returned the young lady. "Take away the veil from them, at least."

"Elizabeth, I will," said he, "as far as my vow may suffer me. Know, then, this veil is a type and a symbol, and I am bound to wear it ever." (378)

With her eyes "fixed … steadfastly upon the veil" and "unappalled by the awe with which [it] had impressed all beside herself," Elizabeth is determined to see only what is there: "a double fold of crape" (378). But not even her "direct simplicity" can break the spell of the veil, for she too immediately is caught up in the system of figures that it generates. And her figure of speech—"let the sun shine from behind the cloud"—entangles her language and perception in the knot of analogies that complicates the narrative logic of "The Minister's Black Veil": Veil is to face as cloud is to sun, as night is to day, as time is to eternity, as body is to spirit, as words are to truth, and, most disturbingly perhaps, as face is to self. Many of the complexities of these associations must be put aside to be gathered up later, but it is important to note at this point that the focus is now on the problem of words and their meanings. Hooper's words like his face are veiled in the sense that they are figurative or parabolic expressions, public utterances that are the exoteric expression of an esoteric message. When he is asked by Elizabeth to unveil them, he does so by asserting the figural nature of the "piece of crape" but refusing to specify its meaning. The result is that she too is now enveloped by the veil's "terrors" despite Hooper's assurance that it is only a "material emblem" (380).

"Have patience with me, Elizabeth!" cried he, passionately. "Do not desert me, though this veil must be between us here on earth. Be mine, and hereafter there shall be no veil over my face, no darkness between our souls! It is but a mortal veil—it is not for eternity! Oh! you know not now how lonely I am, and how frightened to be alone behind my black veil. Do not leave me in my miserable obscurity for ever!"

"Lift the veil but once, and look me in the face," said she.

"Never! It cannot be!" replied Mr. Hooper.

"Then farewell!" said Elizabeth. (379)

The impasse here is the result of a sort of erosion of the distinction between literal and figural modes on which significance depends. Both Elizabeth and Hooper insist on the literal or material aspects of the veil, but neither of them is able to focus exclusively on it as a physical object. It is as if the "piece of crape" is always already figurative and thwarts all attempts firmly to fix its referential status. This sense of figurative excess is strengthened if the textual context is enlarged to include Hawthorne's other writings, for the veil is a figure that assumes a major structuring role in his world. As I have argued elsewhere, the question of the nature of the writer's identity is a central one for Hawthorne.⁷ For him the relation between a writer's personal identity and the form of its manifestation to the world is a part of the larger problem of the relation between a human being's inner and social beings. More than most writers he is fascinated by the ways in which a writer's work is at once a veil that he wears and a manifestation of his most intimate concerns. The metaphorics of veiling do not creep into his text unreflectively. A "cloudy veil stretches over the abyss of my nature,"⁸ he writes to Sophia, and most of his characters figuratively veil themselves in one way or another albeit without inspiring the dread that the Reverend Hooper does. Holgrave, for example, "habitually masked whatever lay near his heart" by his "New England reserve" (610), and Zenobia's pseudonymity is "a sort of mask in which she comes before the world, retaining all the privileges of privacy—a contrivance … like the white drapery of the Veiled Lady, only a little more transparent" (637).

As author, Hawthorne is as fond of veils as are his characters. His fascination with pseudonyms is well known—he used at different times M. de l'Aubépine, Oberon, and Ashley Allen Royce—and he published many of his early sketches either anonymously or under the signature of Nathaniel Hawthorne, having inserted a "w" in his family name at college. Fiction for him is a way of "opening an intercourse with the world" (1152) only in the sense that it is an appeal to "sensibilities … such as are diffused among us all. So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face" (1147). Not even the apparently autobiographical figure of the prefaces can be taken as an unveiled version of the author. The writer's "external habits, his abode, his casual associates" are veils that "hide the man, instead of displaying him" (1154-5), and his characters too are veils or disguises that he wears. Coverdale, for example, as the "most extensively autobiographical character in Hawthorne's fiction"⁹ is at once a manifestation of Hawthorne and a distortion that alters that manifestation. Hence in "The Custom House" he writes that "we may prate of circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil" (121). The "veil" in this case is precisely that of figure, for the author ("keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine") first asks that the sketch be

considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR … and if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will be readily excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessings on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet! (156)

But as he announces the freedom that his "figurative self enjoys, he reminds us that the "real human being with his head safely on his shoulders … had opened a long-disused writing desk and was again a literary man" (155-6). To be a "literary man," however, is also to wear the veil of figure. The narrator of "The Custom House" cannot be present in his own person but must appear as the "representative" (127) of others who are absent: his ancestors, his "ancient predecessor, Mr. Surveyor Pue" (156), even an earlier version of himself, a "scribbler of bygone days" (157). Substituting for self-presence, according to the "law of literary propriety" is the figure of a "literary man," a "romance writer" (149), and this figurative self, the self given by the act of language, is the only one locatable in Hawthorne's text. That self is always a veiled self, for it is an "I" or a subject represented by its signs or markers.

Thus, when Hooper dons his black veil his literal action repeats a biblical and literary figure but in a way that disturbs its status as a convention. His insistence that the veil is simultaneously literal and figural (a "material emblem" [380]) generates the uncanny wavering of a double reading that contaminates and breaks down the symmetrical chiasmus between the material and the emblematic. This disturbing wavering is most apparent in the associations between the veil and death, for death, since it cannot be experienced sensuously or psychologically, has to be expressed figuratively. The "hour" of death is the "dreadful hour that should snatch the veil from [our] faces" (375), and when the "veil of eternity [is] lifted" (383), "Death [bares] his visage" (381) and holds us in his "arms" (383). To speak of death as apocalyptic in the etymological sense of revelation or unveiling is to speak biblically and to anticipate that moment when all things are spoken plainly without the veil of similitude, but to give death a face and body is to figure or refigure it and to imply a necessary dependency on figurative language that defaces at the same time that it gives a face.

While his auditors shrank from one another, in mutual affright, Father Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse, with a faint smile lingering on the lips. Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave. 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! (384)

This passage is about a literal corpse, not about a figure for death or a figural representation of death. But the corpse is a veiled corpse, and as such it disrupts our conception of the literal as opposed to the figural by disturbing the system of analogies that energizes the text. When the veiled corpse is inserted in the chain of figures—veil is to face as body is to soul, as face is to self, as letter is to spirit, as veil is to corpse—the corpse occupies the position that face, soul, self, and spirit do in the system of analogies and disturbs the symmetrical structure of that system. When the corpse takes the place of the living body, the veil becomes the veil of a veil, the covering of a covering; it introduces the possibility that the face, the self, the spirit, the soul are figures. What is terrifyingly awful is the thought that veil and face decay together, for that thought reveals the literal as effaced figure and suggests that language works to cover up such effacements. To be told that Mr. Hooper's face turns to dust beneath the veil is to be reminded of the fact that Hooper's "palefaced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister, as his black veil to them" (373). Their "pale visages," it appears, remind him of the "visage" of "Death" (381), for he is forced "to give up his customary walk, at sunset, to the burial ground," because "there would always be faces behind the gravestones, peeping at his black veil. A fable went the rounds, that the stare of the dead people drove him thence" (380). The human face here no less than the sunset is a figure for death, the figure that fills the blank about which nothing can be said literally.

The human countenance, then, like the parable cannot be taken at face value, and therefore our situation as readers of "The Minister's Black Veil" is allegorically expressed by the situation of the characters in the story.¹⁰ We, like Father Hooper's congregation, are denied a "face to face" (39) relation with the author who remains concealed behind the veil of the text, and he, like Hooper, insists at one and the same time on the text's material and emblematic status. Like The Scarlet Letter, "The Minister's Black Veil" is, on the one hand, "putatively historical … based on a reconstructed literal past" and yet on the other, it presents its actualities as signs or emblems" that signify something other than themselves and hence require interpretive action from a reader. In this sense Hawthorne's texts, like Christ's parables, seem to consist of a manifest carnal sense for the uninitiated outsider and a latent spiritual one available to the insider who has the benefit of special eye-opening knowledge and who therefore understands that the story cannot be taken at face value.¹² This certainly is the way Melville reads Hawthorne.

The truth seems to be, that like many other geniuses, this Man of Mosses takes a great delight in hoodwinking the world…. But with whatever motive, playful or profound, Nathaniel Hawthorne has chosen to entitle his pieces in the manner he has, it is certain, that some of them are directly calculated to deceive—egregiously deceive—the superficial skimmer of pages.

Still, as Melville's essay suggests, it is not easy to articulate what the "eagle-eyed reader" sees in the text that is as "deep as Dante" except to say that it is a "direct and unqualified manifestation" of Hawthorne's "blackness,"¹³ a response not unlike that of Father Hooper's congregation to his black veil. In a curious way Hawthorne's text appears to turn insiders into outsiders, as Christ's parables seem to do in Mark's rather severe account of them. Kermode points out that Mark uses "mystery" as a synonym for "parable" and implies that the stories are dark riddles that not even the disciples, the most privileged interpreters, can answer (Kermode, 46). In this sense the parable as a genre seems remarkably similar to Romance as Hawthorne defines it in his prefaces. Romance for Hawthorne offers a mode of communication that maintains a tension between the hidden and the shown, thereby insuring that something will always remain in reserve, either as an unformulated thought shaded by language or in the form of a veiled figure whose meaning is not explicitly signified. Consider, for example, Hawthorne's description of Dimmesdale's confession in "The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter": "With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation" (338). Like the "multitude" with its "strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in the murmur" that follows Dimmesdale's "final word" (339), the narrator finds it difficult directly to say what he sees, perhaps because what he sees remains shaded by the veil of figure even in the "mid-day sunshine" (341). Dimmesdale himself suggests as much when, after insisting that Hester's scarlet letter "with all its mysterious horror … is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast," goes on to say that "his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart" (338). No wonder then that "there was more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold."

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who, were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a newborn infant's. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying,—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels,—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man's own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress upon his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinner all alike. It was to teach them, that the holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward. (340-1)

This "version of Mr. Dimmesdale's story" (341) suggests how seeing for Hawthorne is always interpretation in the sense that what is seen inevitably is taken as a sign standing for something else as in the case of a hieroglyph or a parable. And the meanings or "morals" which these signs "press upon us" must be "put … into … sentence[s]" (341) that become in their turn perplexing. Hence the "curious investigator" (the reader) who "perplex[es] himself with the purport" of the "semblance of an engraved escutcheon" carved on the "simple slab of slate" (345) marking the graves of Hester and Dimmesdale merely echoes the reactions of the "men of rank and dignity" who witness Dimmesdale's confession and are "perplexed as to the purport of what they saw" (336). This aspect of the human situation appears most clearly in the face of death (in Dimmesdale's "dying words" and in Hooper's "veiled corpse") for since death is nothing, our anguished anticipation of it, our attempt to articulate our relation to it, is necessarily oblique and parabolic.

For Hawthorne, then, the generic mark is not so much the sign of an aesthetic and/or historical category as it is a sort of epitaphic inscription that becomes a figure for story as such, that "Faery Land" realm inhabited by ghostlike presences that have a "propriety of their own" (633). Ordinary words like Hooper's veiled face "are a mystery" (378) because they are defamiliarized, detached from their referential function, from a present moment and a living "I," and hence presuppose as well as record the fact of death—in the case of "The Minister's Black Veil" that of the historical original, "Mr. Joseph Moody of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since" (371), that of Parson Hooper, Moody's fictional representation, and, finally, that of the author. Romance and parable are names for "Posthumous papers," fictional products of one "who writes from beyond the grave" (156), speaking monuments whose words like those inscribed on Hester and Dimmesdale's tombstone serve only to "perplex" the reader who is always the last surviving consciousness.

Notes

¹ All references to Hawthorne's fiction will be to the following editions: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novels, ed. Millicent Bell (New York: The Library of America, 1983); Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: The Library of America, 1982).

² For a discussion of the Reverend Moody of York, Maine, and his relation to Hawthorne's story, see J. Hillis Miller, "Literature and History: The Example of Hawthorne's 'The Minister's Black Veil,'" Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 41 (Feb. 1988), 20-1, and especially Frederick Newberry, "The Biblical Veil: Sources and Typology in Hawthorne's 'The Minister's Black Veil,'" Texas Studies in Language and Literature 31 (Summer 1989), 171-83.

³ William Smith, Dictionary of the Bible, ed. H. B. Hackett (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871), vol 1, p. 807. I am using Smith's and other nineteenth-century works of biblical scholarship with the assumption that they will reflect Hawthorne's understanding of parable. Hereafter cited in the text as Smith.

⁴ This tension between historical and figural meaning is reflected in recent commentary on Hawthorne's story, which is seen, on the one hand, as the representation of a particular historical moment in the evolution of New England Puritanism (Michael Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984], pp. 314-85, and Newberry, cited above, 169-95) and, on the other, as an expression of a linguistic turn in humanistic studies that concedes that language can no longer be understood as simply a medium for the representation of a reality outside itself (Miller, cited above, 15-31, and J. Hillis Miller, "The Profession of English: An Exchange," ADE Bulletin 88 [Winter 1987], 41-8). My own reading resembles Miller's rhetorical one (I am especially indebted to his discussion of the trope of prosopopoeia in Hawthorne's text) but differs from his in suggesting that the generic mark offers at least a partial solution to the story's hermeneutical difficulties.

⁵ For two useful but different treatments of the biblical context of Hawthorne's story see Judy McCarthy, "'The Minister's Black Veil': The Concealing Moses and the Holy of Holies," Studies in Short Fiction 24 (Spring 1987), 131-8, and Newberry, cited above. Newberry's account is an especially suggestive one, but his reading differs from mine in seeing the story as a criticism of Father Hooper because his veil "divides mortals from one another and from God, and … finally amounts to a profound anachronism whose emphasis on the age of Old Adam essentially renounces the availability of redemption through Christ's only historical appearance" (189).

⁶ Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown, A Commentary, Critical and Explanatory on the Old andNew Testaments, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: S. S. Scranton Co., 1872), vol. 2, p. 304. Hereafter cited in the text as Jamieson.

⁷ Edgar Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthrone: The Poetics of Enchantment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977).

⁸ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Letters 1813-1843, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, eds. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude Simpson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), vol. 15, p. 612.

⁹ Arlin Turner, "Introduction," Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), p. 23.

¹⁰ On this point see Miller, "Literature and History," 45-6.

¹¹ Millicent Bell, "The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter," Massachusetts Review (Spring 1982), 10.

¹² I am indebted here to Frank Kermode's discussion of parable in The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 4. Hereafter cited in the text as Kermode.

¹³ Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987), vol. 9, pp. 250-1.