Hawthorne

In the story "The Minister's Black Veil", the author Nathaniel Hawthorne toys with the idea of secrecy and sinful desires that may not even be apparent to the ones you call your closest. I like the symbolism he uses in the story such as the underlying reason why Reverend Hooper is wearing the black veil even though it goes unstated. We can gather from the text that he starts wearing the veil at the funeral of an unnamed young lady, and doesn't take it off ever again. He says that the black veil represents secret sin, and that everyone of the townspeople are like him in that they all have some kind of secret sin that goes unnoticed. The symbols we can gather from this instance is that Reverend Hooper could have possibly had an affair with the young maiden who died, and his guilt made him wear the veil from then until death.

One of the onlookers says this quote: "I had a fancy," replied she, "that the minister and the maiden's spirit were walking hand in hand." This only further solidifies the suspicion that Reverend Hooper was unfaithful to his late fiancee Elizabeth, who left him because she couldn't handle him wearing the veil any longer. Both of these facts bring me to this specific quote in the story that caught my attention when I read it again (this was my favorite story of all three): "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."

There is a great deal of irony in this statement. He really hasn't changed himself into something awful at all, because what he already did before wearing the veil was awful. The veil was Hooper's way of coming to terms with his guilts. So he informs the townspeople of secret sin but doesn't reveal the significance of the veil in that, whether or not everyone was shaken up by the look of the horrifying veil upon his face. Many ask why he wears it, but when he offers no explanation, the sin stays in secrecy, and more and more people get turned off to it. His fiancee Elizabeth ends up leaving him because she can't understand why he goes on wearing it.