“The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The New York Times recently published a reading list for public school students proposed by the state of Texas, scheduled to take effect in 2030. The list got a lot of attention because of the ongoing culture wars. In particular, many folks, concerned about a secular education being infiltrated by religious teaching objected to the Bible selections included. I had no problem with that. A general familiarity with the Bible, central to Judaism and Christianity, is crucial to understanding much of western culture, which ought to be one aim of a general education. And many of the Bible passages selected also supported a second worthy goal of the curriculum: teaching good character and ethics.

I had read most of the literature included but I was struck by this Hawthorne story, which I had not read. I figured if eleventh grade students in Texas were expected to know this story, I ought to as well. It is one of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales collected in 1837. I found it easily online. It’s a quick read.

The story begins on a Sunday as the community gathers for worship. The congregation is surprised to discover that their minister, Reverend Hooper, has augmented his regular costume with a black veil covering the upper portion of his face, leaving his mouth and chin visible and sufficiently thin to allow him to see though but obscuring his eyes from others. The minister provides no explanation for the veil and conducts the service as usual preaching a sermon on the subject of “secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them.”

Rev. Hooper conducts the afternoon service from behind his veil, and a funeral after the service, where the veil may be considered appropriate, but he’s still wearing the veil as he officiates at a wedding that evening. (A busy day for a minister!) No church member feels competent to challenge the minister directly. Eventually they send a team of deputies, who are similarly intimidated. Finally, Rev. Hooper is confronted by the woman pledged to be his wife, Elizabeth. She asks him to remove the veil; he won’t, saying it will only come off at his death. She asks him to explain; he says:

“If I hide my face for sorrow, there is cause enough,” he merely replied; “and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do the same?”

She says, “farewell” to him and the engagement. To this point, the story had covered just a few days. Now it leaps forward throughout the minister’s life. He remains unmarried. Surprisingly, Hawthorne says, “Among all its bad influences, the black veil had the one desirable effect, of making its wearer a very efficient clergyman” at least so far as his office of reconciling sinners. That may be so, but a minister’s job encompasses much more than merely terrifying sinners. I doubt a congregation would long stand for such an affectation.

The story ends at Rev. Hooper’s death. He is attended by a doctor and another clergyman. Elizabeth is there, too; she also remained unmarried and had become a nurse. Even at the end Rev. Hooper ignores his friend’s entreaties and refuses to remove the veil, dying with it, buried with it. The symbol is explained in Rev. Hooper’s plain words before dying. He says:

“When the friend shows his inmost heart to his 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!”

Hawthorne seems to have been inspired by a true story. He apends this note to the end of his story:

“NOTE. Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend; and from that day till the hour of his own death, he hid his face from men.”

I was struck by another short reference in the story. On the first day of Rev. Hooper wearing the veil when he officiates at the wedding, the wedding couple and guests are disturbed by the gloomy spirit the black veil casts over the festivities and compare the ruined wedding to another one. “If ever another wedding were so dismal, it was that famous one where they tolled the wedding knell.”

I knew of no such famous wedding. But the reference was easily found. In a bit of meta-fiction Hawthorne refers to his own story, “The Wedding-Knell” another of his Twice-Told Tales.