Symbolism In The Minister's Black Veil

871 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: impact of religion in a society

Nathaniel Hawthorne in “The Minister’s Black Veil” is able to show the hypocrisy and the overemphasis of the Puritan people and their beliefs by engaging the reader in this short story by using “a gentlemanly person” (409) who decides to start wearing a black veil over his face. As Milford’s finest gather on “the porch of [the] meeting house” (409) and enjoy the hope of another Sunday service, the townspeople’s sunny disposition and picturesque setting soon changes as Parson Hooper emerges with a “simple piece of crape” covering his face. This unusual appearance of the Reverend to the townspeople even has some of them feeling faint and forcing some women “of delicate nerves to leave the service” (410). Even though Parson Hooper’s demeanor and his polite and gracious behavior is the same as always, and his preaching is much more interesting and entertaining, the townspeople perceive their minister far differently. As Parson Hooper continues to don the veil, people start to stare at him and rumors begin to fly, especially since his sermon dealt with the topic of secret sin. As the people make him a social pariah, Parson Hooper becomes a representation of hidden sin and an object of dread. Even as death knocks on his door, Parson Hooper still will not allow himself to be unveiled, in fact, Hooper finally reveals that no one should be afraid of him, but of one another because “men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled” (417) all because of a simple black veil. Through the use of symbols, Hawthorne is able to use this short story to prove that the community people and the Puritan’s religion and their beliefs are hypocritical and over zealous. One of the first ways that depicts the Puritans or t... ... middle of paper ... ... the reader that Parson Hooper may be seen as having the power of God or of one who knows all. The townspeople feared the possibly of others and even God knowing their iniquities and wrongdoings. Even though, the Puritans and the townspeople of Milford place a great deal of respect and emphasis on God, as they reject assessing their sins, they are, in fact, rejecting God as well, just as they rejected Parson Hooper. As Hawthorne shares his short story, the writing teaches a lesson and helps to prove the hypocrisy and overemphasis of the Puritan faith and the beliefs of the townspeople of Milford. These community people were far more interested in the spirituality of others than they were their own, and encouraged secret vices over public display. Hawthorne adequately presented the lesson that to judge oneself was far more important than judging others.

Show More
Related

  • Characterism In 'The Minister's Black Veil'

    892 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Minister’s Black Veil”, the reader is introduced to Parson Hooper, the reverend of a small Puritan village. One Sunday morning, Hooper arrived to mass with a black veil over his impassive face. The townspeople began to feel uneasy due to their minister’s unusual behavior. When Parson appeared, “Few could refrain from twisting their heads towards the door; many stood upright….” (Monteiro 2). Throughout the story Hooper does not take off the black veil and the townspeople, including Reverend Clark from a nearby village, treat him as if he were contagious disease. A veil typically is used to represent sorrow, but in this story it is used to represent hidden sins. No one exactly knows why he

    Read More

  • Romanticism In 'The Minister's Black Veil'

    1013 Words  | 3 Pages

    This short story reflects the Puritans’ lifestyle in the early colonial stage by using the black veil of Reverend Hooper to guide people through the sinful and struggling life of the Puritans. “The Minister’s Black Veil” is only one of the great stories written by Nathanial Hawthorne, and there are more Romanticism books like The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and they also talk about the changes and struggles of human

    Read More

  • Figurative Language in “The Minister’s Black Veil”

    1026 Words  | 3 Pages

    Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" illustrates the dangers of secret sin. Allowing guilt from things done in the past, things that cannot be changed, can ruin lives. The life of the secret-carrier will be devastated, along with the lives of that person's most loved ones. Hawthorne uses various types of figurative language in his works to portray his message. "The Minister's Black Veil” is no exception; Hawthorne uses symbolism and suggestion to add depth and mystery.

    Read More

  • The Allegory Of Nathanial Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

    1362 Words  | 3 Pages

    This allegory is a strong image of man’s relentless battle between good and evil. Mankind’s personal and social quarrels through different dealings can result in good consequences and/or bad consequences. There are many symbols throughout Young Goodman Brown that exemplify Puritan ideology relate to modern times, such as faith, the staff and the forest. Additionally, Nathanial Hawthorne’s ancestral tie to the Salem Witch Trial is a great example of how a man can be tainted by social influences. However, it is up to each person to choose their own path, guided by their perception of faith, no matter their religion. “Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. (pgs. 325-337)”

    Read More

  • Ambiguity of The Minister’s Black Veil

    3124 Words  | 7 Pages

    There is no end to the ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”; this essay hopes to explore this problem within the tale.

    Read More

  • The Minister’s Black Veil by Nathaniel Hwathorne

    924 Words  | 2 Pages

    Nathaniel Hawthorne, a well-known American novelist in the Romantic era, wrote and published the short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” in 1836. The story provides an intriguing case of the moral and psychological facet of a religious man and his community during New England and Puritan Age. The tale begins with the villagers gathering on the front porch of the Milford meeting-house to wait for Reverend Hooper. Parson Hooper arrives, and to their astonishment, wearing a black veil obscuring his face. The villagers wonder among themselves and follow him into the meeting-house where he speaks on secret sin. The crowd is greatly affected by the veil, and leave confused of its significance. After the sermon, a funeral is held for a young woman, and his veil now becomes “acceptable”. After a few prayers, the funeral ends and someone mention that it seems “the minister and the maiden’s spirit were walking hand in hand”. He attends and brings gloom into a wedding the same night. His wearing the veil and refusal to remove it leads to the village isolating him, his fiancée leaving after an offer of redemption, and a life as a good clergyman. When it comes time for his death, he once again refuses to take off the veil, and accuses everyone to having a black veil. As Daniel Webster said, “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.” Character, symbolism, and solemn tone create a theme of rejection, socially and psychologically.

    Read More

  • Minister's Black Veil

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    {NEED A TOPIC SENTENCE} The very beginning of the story is a portrait of a happy everyday life in Milford - merry children are willing to make fun of a graver's gait, spruce bachelors are looking sidelong at the pretty maidens and a sexton is tolling the bell - and its light-hearted mood contrasts with that of the rest of the story. It gives us a taste of what the parson's life was like before his decision to wear his black veil.When Mr. Hooper appears wearing a black veil “[s]wathed about his forehead, and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by his breath” (1) a period of alienation starts in his life. This event is not expected since Mr. Hooper is “a gentlemanly person” (1) and has the reputation of a “of a good preacher, but not an energetic one: he strove to win his people heavenward by mild, persuasive influences, rather than to drive them thither by the thunders of the Word” (2). The veil itself, Hawthorne tells us, consists of two folds of crape which entirely conceal Mr. Hooper's features, "except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things"(1). E. Earle Stibitz explains how Mr. Hopper’s is shown as an “essentially weak man, poorly prepared by his unmarried solitude, his somewhat morbid temperament, and his professional position to deal in a stable way with an absorbing religious idea that harmonizes with his personal and vocational prejudices(188).

    Read More

  • The Minister's Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne

    556 Words  | 2 Pages

    Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" embodies the hidden sins that we all hide and that in turn distance us from the ones we love most. Reverend Hooper dons a black veil throughout this story, and never takes it off. He has discerned in everyone a dark, hidden self of secret sin. In wearing the veil Hooper dramatizes the isolation that each person experiences when they are chained down by their own sinful deeds. He has realizes that symbolically everyone can be found in the shadow of their own dark veil. Hooper in wearing this shroud across his face is only amplifying the dark side of people and the truth of human existence and nature.

    Read More

  • Symbolism In The Veil

    1482 Words  | 3 Pages

    The veil that the minister wears in "The Ministers Black Veil", by Nathanial Hawthorne represents the emphasis on man's inner reality, and those thoughts and feelings which are not immediately obvious. As Hawthorne explored this inner nature, he found the source of dignity and virtue, and certain elements of darkness. When the minister first walks out of his home wearing the veil, everyone is astonished. This one man in this village decides to be a nonconformist and wear this veil without explanation. No one understands why the minister would wear such a veil for no reason at all. This is where all the assumptions begin to linger. All of the villagers have a story for why the veil is there. These people are not trying to understand it. These villagers are just trying convince themselves that the veil is hiding something, like a deformation of the ministers face. Others think that Mr. Hooper is hiding something else, like a secret no one is supposed to know about. This black veil conflicts with everyone in the village in some way. Is this veil a problem only because everyone is afraid of what they might be hiding? Perhaps this veil is a symbol of the mistrust Mr. Hooper has to those people closest to him or maybe he is trying to show this society that there is a greater lesson to be learned from this black veil than just an apparent one:

    Read More

  • The Minister's Black Veil Essay

    1184 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the book “The Minister’s Black Veil” is an American Romanticism story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mr. Hooper is the main character of this story. Mr. Hooper is the minister but there's something suspicious about him. He wears a black veil everyday, for couple years, and also when he died. He want to keep it on and wanted no one remove it after he died.Nobody knew why the minister would wear the black veil or why he would never take it off. May clues and reasons but none knew right. This story shows a lot of moral and religious lessons.

    Read More

  • Hypocrisy In The Devil And Tom Walke

    964 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hooper delivers his sermon, which is about how everyone has a secret sin that acts as a barrier between themselves and the others around them, with a black veil covering his face, “each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought.” (106). The message of his sermon, paired with the veil, causes the townspeople to feel as if Mr. Hooper can see their individual secret sins and expose them to the public, which, in a Puritanical society, makes one vulnerable to public punishment or ostracism by the community. Due to their fears of having their Christian facades shattered and their subsequent sinful natures revealed, the townspeople alienate the minister. This reflects hypocrisy in the sense that their fears come from knowing they are essentially living double lives, which causes more hypocritical behavior to arise in the form of treating their minister in quite the opposite way one should treat a human being, especially one who serves the church in such a high position. Furthermore, on his deathbed, Mr. Hooper points out the townspeople’s hypocrisy when he exclaims, “Why do you tremble at me alone? Tremble also at each other. . . .I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!” (118). Through this exclamation, he is trying to urge the townspeople to reveal their secret sins and stop hiding under a

    Read More

  • What Does The Minister's Black Veil Symbolize

    938 Words  | 2 Pages

    Most people define a symbol as something, such as an object or an action, utilized in a literary work to represent something else with the belief that the symbol can represent one thing and one thing only. This defines an allegory, a much more obscure literary device, meanwhile a symbol has the exact same function of an allegory except it has the capability to represent many different things instead of just one. This adjusted definition of a symbol now gives symbols much more versatility and allows many more possibilities as to what a symbol could represent. In his short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Nathaniel Hawthorne exploits the black veil to symbolize omnipresent sin everyone possesses and the isolation public wrongdoing brings in

    Read More

  • What Are The Truths In The Minister's Black Veil

    956 Words  | 2 Pages

    Reverend Clark represents the Puritans’ assumptions in this scene, as Boone points out, saying, “That the community comes to believe Hooper is somehow guilty of a dark sin is evidenced by the young Reverend Clark’s ambition to get Mr. Hooper to confess his ‘horrible crime’ before he dies” (Boone 8). Boone believes that the community thought Hooper wore the veil as a symbol for a horrible sin, which can be inferred from Reverend Clark’s mention of one, which he makes even though Hooper never directly said anything of that sort about what the veil means. Hawthorne reveals the flawed values of the Puritan community, writing “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!” (Hawthorne 61). The revelation made about the Puritans is that, although their belief system acknowledges that nobody is without sin, they reacted in shock when their parson represented this belief on himself, and reacted by making him an outcast. If the Puritans were not able to accept the imperfections of others, they certainly could not accept their own. In this way, they are depicted as being arrogant and

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Minister's Black Veil

    718 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Minister’s Black Veil, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1836, is a parable about a minister, Mr. Hooper, who constantly wears a mysterious black veil over his face. The people in the town of Milford, are perplexed by the minister’s veil and cannot figure out why he insists on wearing it all of the time. The veil tends to create a dark atmosphere where ever the minister goes, and the minister cannot even stand to look at his own reflection. In Nathaniel Hawthorne 's literary work, The Minister 's Black Veil, the ambiance of the veil, separation from happiness that it creates, and the permanency of the black veil symbolize sin in people’s lives.

    Read More

  • The Minister’s Black Veil

    970 Words  | 2 Pages

    From the beginning of the story, Mr. Hooper comes out wearing a black veil, which represents sins that he cannot tell to anyone. Swathed about his forehead, and hanging down over his face, Mr. Hooper has on a black veil. Elizabeth urged, “Beloved and respected as you are, there may be whispers that you hid your face under the consciousness of secret sin” (Hawthorne 269). His fiancé says that in the black veil there may be has a consciousness of secret sin. Also, he is a parson in Milford meeting-house and a gentlemanly person, so without the veil, Hooper would be a just typical minister, “guilty of the typical sins of every human, but holier than most” (Boone par.7). He would be a typical minister who is guilty of the typical sins of every human without the black veil. Also, Boone said, “If he confesses his sin, the community can occur” (Boone par.16). If he confesses his sin about the black veil, all of the neighbors will hate him. Last, he said, “so, the veil is a saying: it is constantly signifying, constantly speaking to the people of the possibility of Hooper’s sin” (Boone par.11). Mr. Hooper’s veil says that he is trying to not tell the sins about the black veil. In conclusion, every people have sins that cannot tell to anyone like Mr. Hooper.

    Read More

More about Symbolism In The Minister's Black Veil

Open Document