Hooper.  No one will step forward and acknowledge his/her sins.  In fact, they are frightened by the veil that Mr. Hooper has donned.  Perhaps he knows one of their secrets.

But that piece of crape, to their imagination, seemed to hang down before his heart, the symbol of a fearful secret between him and them.

The characters are as follows:

Reverend Hooper
The reverend is described as a gentlemanly person in his thirties, and a bachelor. He is introduced to us through the shock of his changed appearance; he has begun wearing a black veil. It is insinuated that the veil is a mark he chooses to bear as atonement for some great sin.

The Dead Woman
We know very little about the dead woman, other than that she was a young, and seems to have had some personal connection to Mr. Hooper. Her death clearly affects him, and the townspeople sense a sort of supernatural weight between them that lingers beyond her death, and coincides with Hooper's wearing of the veil. It appears that she, or something about her, is the reason for the veil.

Elizabeth
Elizabeth is Hooper's fiance, and serves as a means for us to "get to know" Hooper. He may confide in her the answers to questions that the townspeople would find too forward or inappropriate. Even so, he does not acquiesce to her desire for him to remove the veil, and so she cancels their marriage, but remains his friend. Elizabeth serves as a way for us to see that Hooper is still human, and that his decision has been carefully considered; neither a deep personal love, nor the desire of his community, will affect his choice.

Reverend Clark
At the end of the story, Clark arrives at Hooper's deathbed in order to perform his last rites, speak of Hooper's virtuous life and excellent work as a clergyman, but also to ask that he reveal the secret of the veil before he dies; he is concerned that Hooper will carry a great sin with him to his judgment.

The Congregation/Townspeople:
They serve as voices of reflection for Hooper's actions, such as by claiming that they had visions of the reverend and a girl's spirit walking side by side. Some of them are given names, such as Goodman Grey, but they do not personally factor into the story any more significantly. As a whole, they deepen the intrigue by allowing us to "see", rather than just be told, that Hooper's wearing of the veil is strange and unsettling.

One further example of external conflict you might like to consider is man v society. In refusing to take off his black veil the minister is pitting himself against his congregation. His stubborn insistence on wearing the veil, even when he's officiating at a wedding, places him at a considerable distance from those he's supposed to serve. Among other things, this means that the minister is unable to carry out his pastoral duties properly, alienating him even further from his flock.

Whatever the reason behind Hooper's strange behavior, his insistence on wearing the veil can be seen as an assertion of the rights of the individual against the community. Like everyone else Hooper is a social being, subject to laws, mores, and numerous conventions. But he's also an individual, again like everyone else, and it's that side of him that he asserts by refusing to take off the black veil.

Though the townsfolk generally disapprove of the black veil, indeed, are deeply unnerved by it, they cannot make Mr. Hooper take it off. What the minister's stubbornness illustrates is the way in which certain self-possessed individuals can defy social convention, no matter how much pressure they're put under to conform.

"The Minister's Black Veil" is another of Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales that is concerned with the secret sin which haunts the Puritans who try to hide their transgressions in fear of punitive measures.

--External Conflict: As a symbol of this secret sin, the Reverend Mr. Hooper dons a black veil to preach his Sunday sermon. However, his wearing of this veil causes the members of his congregation great consternation as they interpret his doing so as a means of covering his own guilt. Consequently, they begin to alienate themselves from him.
--Internal Conflicts: Also, members of the Rev. Hooper's congregation feel that somehow he may be secretly able to peer at their own iniquities behind this veil, and they fear exposure. 
--Internal Conflicts: Members of the congregation are unnerved by Mr. Hooper's refusing to remove the veil.

"I can't really feel as if good Mr. Hooper's face was behind that piece of crepe," said the sexton.
"I don't like it!" muttered an old woman..."He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face."

--External Conflict: "Our parson has gone mad!" said Goodman Gray....The congregation's perception of Mr. Hooper changes. He is no longer invited to Sunday dinners, weddings. Further, the members of the congregation will not directly ask Mr. Hooper why he wears the veil since they fear this veil is related to their own sins.

--External Conflict: A deputation is sent to Mr. Hooper at the church "in order to deal with the minister's mystery before it should grow into a scandal." Mr. Hooper receives them in a cordial manner, but remains silent.
--Internal Conflict: The deputation defers the matter to the synod. They perceive the veil of Mr. Hooper as a "symbol of a fearful secret between him and them." The veil seems to make people aware of their own transgressions.
--External Conflict: Mr. Hooper sets himself apart from the world by his refusal to remove the veil.
--External Conflict: The minister's fiancée, Elizabeth, comes to Mr. Hooper and begs him to remove the veil in order to prevent people from assuming that his expressed grief is for his own personal sin. But, Mr. Hooper refuses, saying on his deathbed that all wear veils. "I look around me and, lo!, on every visage a Black Veil!" 

There are many conflicts within this classic story. The first is between the minister and his congregation. He dons the veil, and this clashes with their needs and expectations. This is directly related to a conflict between good and evil, at least in the eyes of the townspeople. Think of how the old woman swears the corpse shuddered when the veil dropped; the veil is so disturbing it creates a conflict between life and death, and between stages of reality. Conflicts spread, as when a boy imitates the minister and scares his friends.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" is, like his novel The Scarlet Letter, an expose of the hypocrisy of the Puritans and the destructive power of secret sin.  Thus, the action that is pivotal to the plot is, of course, the donning of the dark veil over his face by the Reverend Mr. Hooper.  From this action, all reactions follow. 

• There are mixed reactions from the congregation after Mr. Hooper's sermon about secret sin                                  :

At the close of the services the people hurried out with indecorous confusion....Some gathered in little circles...with their mouths all whispering in the center; some went homeward alone, warapped in silent meditation; some talked loudly and profaned the Sabbath day with ostentatious laghter.  a few shook their sagacious heads, intimating that they could penetrate the mystery, while one or two affirmed that there was no mystery at all.

• For the first time, no one invites Mr. Hooper to partake of the Sunday meal at his/her home.
• When Mr. Hooper does not remove the veil, people begin to believe that he may be hiding something, yet no one "chose to make the black veil a subject of friendly remonstrance." The veil becomes a "symbol of a fearful secret between him and them."
• Even his fiancee has doubts.When Mr. Hooper refuses to lift the veil and let her look in his face, Elizabeth bids him farewell.
• After this incident, no attempts are made to lift what Mr. Hooper has called but a "mortal veil--it is not for eternity."  No one seeks to discover the secret which it supposedly hides.
• As Mr. Hooper walks the streets, the timid turn aside and flee.  Others of "hardihood" would throw themselves in his way.  Children would hide; a "fable went the rounds, that the stare of the dead people drove him thence."
• Affected with an "ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister so that love or sympathy could never reach him."  He is ostracized from the community.
• But, he becomes "a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for sin.  His converts tell him that before they have been brought to the "celestial light," they, too, hid behind a "veil."
• He is given the honor of preaching at Election Day as he sets the tone appropriate for the Puritan occasion.
• Mr. Hooper spends his long life "irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions"; he is unloved and dreaded.
• As he lies dying, the Reverend Mr. Hooper yet refuses to lift his veil so that he should not "leave a shadow on his memory," as another minister beseeches him.  Before he dies Mr. Hooper states Hawthorne's theme,

"Why do you tremble at me alone?....Tremble also at each other!  Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and chren screamed and fled, only for my black veil?...When the friend shows his inmost heart tohis 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; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die!  I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!"

• The villagers bury the Reverend Mr. Hooper without removing his black veil. 

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Minister's Black Veil," the Minister Mr. Hooper dons a black veil one day after having an epiphany related to his desire to draw his flock away from sin. He wears the veil at all times without giving any explanation to his parishioners.

The parishioners come to suspect that the veil represents some terrible hidden sin in the Minister's life, but they also feel that it gives him some other-worldly awe and unapproachable power, as though he can see directly into their secrets.

For the Minister the veil symbolizes the hidden, unacknowledged sins belonging to himself, his parishioners and humankind in general. For the people, the veil symbolizes the mysterious unattainability of righteousness and goodness. In the end, on his deathbed, Mr. Hooper proclaims that he sees a black veil on the face of every person he looks at. This symbolizes the failure of individuals to truly know themselves and to truly evaluate their inner lives, actions and thoughts by a yardstick of right mindedness.

The thesis of Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" is essentially the same as that of his story "Young Goodman Brown," which is that everybody has a dark side of his or her character which we all hide behind metaphorical veils or masks for self-protection and self-promotion. In modern parlance such a veil or mask is called a "persona." It is not really us but who we would like the world to think we are. "The Minister's Black Veil" is unique in literature because the minister actually begins wearing a veil to hide his face. This is like a confession that he has wicked thoughts and feelings--if not wicked deeds--to hide from the world. The veil disturbs everybody else in his community because it makes them aware that they are hiding their own guilty secrets behind  assumed expressions of benevolence and integrity. The story should make us ask ourselves if we have anything to hide from the world. Most of us would have to confess that we have at least had a dark thought or two, but most of us are not as concerned with being models of righteousness as people were in Puritan times.

The power of Nathaniel Hawthorne's story derives from the fact that the symbol of the veil is totally open to interpretation by the townspeople; their distrust turns it into something evil.

After Reverend Hooper dons the veil, people initially accept it as an eccentric way of conveying the message he says it does. However, they soon become suspicious and even resentful. Is it more likely, they seem to ask, that he is chiding them for trying to hide from God, or that he has something to hide?

Once the town starts to turn against him, he digs in his heels. Why does he refuse to remove it, they wonder? Perhaps his faith in his right to be different outweighs his need to conform. But perhaps he does have, as they suspect, "a fearful secret."

Questions of individuality, principle, privacy, and tolerance can all be explored through this symbol.

The villagers in "The Minister's Black Veil" suggest that the black veil symbolizes either a secret sin or a great sorrow. The popular theory within the village seems to be that the veil is a symbol of sin; however, for Hawthorne, I think that the veil symbolizes something more abstract and, ultimately, more pervasive. Throughout the story, the veil has the effect of driving everyone away from Mr. Hooper and isolating him from others. After he dons the veil, they can no longer identify with him or understand him and everyone drifts away. I think that ultimately, for Hawthorne, the veil symbolizes isolation from others and that no matter how hard we try to connect with others we will always be isolated because others can never truly understand us.

Reverend Hooper's veil is, of course, the central symbol in the story, and its effects on Hooper's life, the lives of his fiance, Elizabeth, and his congregation are profoundly negative.  Indeed, many readers, as well as Hawthorne's critics, have wondered why Hooper, upon realizing that the veil's symbolic meaning is misunderstood, doesn't attempt to make his intent clear.  

The symbolic meaning of the veil, despite the fact that Hooper's congregation is too unnerved to understand it, is made explicit in the sermon Hooper gives the day he puts the veil on:

The subject had reference to secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we hide from out nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal form our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient [that is, God] can detect them.

We know from the narration that everyone who heard this sermon feels as if Hooper has looked into his or her heart--from "the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast"--and discovered those secret sins of which the veil is the symbol.  One can argue, based on this detail, that the veil's meaning is not a  mystery but rather that its meaning is consciously pushed aside.

A question that flows from the veil itself is, "Why choose a veil to symbolize one's secret sins?"  The answer is, I  think, in the eyes behind the veil.  A common refrain in the 17thC., as well as in the 21stC., is that the "eyes are the windows of the soul" or, as Alexander Pope expressed it, the "eyes mirror the soul."  By wearing the veil, Hooper is closing down not only one of the most important of our senses but also the sense that we all depend upon to judge how another person is feeling.  There's a reason, for example, that police officers, when questioning someone, want to look into that person's eyes.  One's voice can be disguised; the look in the eyes cannot.  For Reverend Hooper, then, masking the eyes with a veil--the windows of the soul--is a natural emblem to represent everyone's tendency to "mask" his or her soul from others, the place where secret sins reside, protected from disclosure.

Hooper's choice of the veil to mask the eyes is a perfect way to evoke the concept of hidden sins, but one of the enduring questions about this story is whether or not Hooper was entirely effective in his attempt to teach his congregation to take off their own "veils."  After all, he essentially ruined his own life, blasted the potential happiness of his fiance, and created a gulf between his congregation and himself in order to carry the symbol to his deathbed.  Does the veil successfully evoke the theme of secret sin?  Yes and no.

I have always read this story as part of Hawthorne's continuing exploration of a theme he expressed directly in The Scarlet Letter.

And be the stern and sad truth
spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human
soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched
and guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again
into the citadel, and might even in his subsequent assaults,
select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had
formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall, and near
it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his
unforgotten triumph.

Parson Hooper has committed some sin, the exact nature of which is never reveals, although there are hints that it had something to do with the young woman in the coffin, especially since the veil and the funeral are tied together.  He elects to display knowledge of his guilt to the community, although he never tells them what he has done, just as their "secret sin" remains unknown to him.  Ironically, he, as Dimmesdale, become a better minister through his personal suffering.

His new appearance, and that is all that has changed, just his appearance, frightening the congregation, perhaps because he is now a mirror to them of things they would rather not face.  Hooper could easily have taken off the veil, much as Hester could have taken off the Scarlet Letter when she return to the colonies ... but the taking off would not heal the breach, so they both elect to acknowledge their failing, one specified, the other not, until death.

It's difficult for us, inhabitants of a world that almost denies sin, to understand their position, but for older generations sin was as real as psychosis is to us in the era of Freud.  When you sinned, you created a breach that was never really healed in this life.  This story, like many others of Hawthorne, explore this breach and its implications.

The first description of the minister's veil is that it is black--as seen in the title of Hawthorne's famous short story. The veil's description is also addressed within the first few paragraphs of the story as something "remarkable" to see. The veil is "swathed about his forehead, and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by his breath." The word "swathed" means that a long, thick material is wrapped around his head and then comes down in front of his face. It is interesting to note that the veil hides the minister's whole face except for his mouth and chin. Another interesting fact is that the veil sways up and down as he breathes which creates a spooky or creepy visual image. Ironically, this certainly isn't an image one would like to see when conversing with a spiritual leader.

Reverend Mr. Clark is a neighboring minister who comes to to take care of Reverend Mr. Hooper, who is dying. He is mystified by the Rev. Mr. Hooper's refusal to remove the black veil. He is unable to convince him to take it off.

Elizabeth is the woman who is engaged to Hooper. At first, she is understanding of his wearing the veil, seeing it as a piece of cloth. Yet, when he refuses to remove it, their engagement is severed. She remains true to him in friendship, staying with him while he is at death's door.

Reverend Mr. Hooper is a minister who wears the black veil. He refuses to take it off, even in death. He wears it as a symbol of mankind's hidden secrets.

The theme of Hawthorne's story is a familiar one of hidden human guilt. Hawthorne believed that all humans were partly wicked, at least in their thoughts and fantasies, and that they conceal this dark side of their characters behind masks of friendliness, politeness, and integrity.The pessimistic German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expresses this view in the following words:

O for an Asmodeus of morality who for his minion rendered transparent not merely roofs and walls, but also the veil of dissimulation, falseness, hypocrisy, grimace, lying, and deception that is spread over everything, and who enabled him to see how little genuine honesty is to be found in the world and how often injustice and dishonesty sit at the helm, secretly and in the innermost recess, behind all the virtuous outworks, even where we least suspect them. 

Henry James wrote that Hawthorne's was an age-old truism which Hawthorne seemed to regard as his personal discovery. James also contended that Hawthorne was not as concerned about human wickedness as he seemed, but that he liked to use it for dramatic purposes, as he did with such success in his novel The Scarlet Letter. It may be that "The Minister's Black Veil" was conceived more for its dramatic effectiveness than for any moral it was intended to preach.

Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's novel  The Catcher in the Rye  seems to have discovered, or rediscovered, the truth that people hide their real selves behind masks, which psychologists now call "personas." The people of Hawthorne's time and place were more concerned about matters of conscience because they sincerely believed that they could be punished for their sins with eternal fire and brimstone, and they were reminded of this every Sunday at  church. Reverend Hooper was using a new tactic by wearing a black veil wherever he went, gently reminding people that they were all sinners and that they might be able to fool one another but that they would all have their sins revealed and severely punished on Judgment Day.