Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros85General SectionNathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minist...

General Section

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”: Hooper’s Hieroglyphics

Romain Wong
p. 213-230

Résumés

Cet article étudie la nouvelle de Nathaniel Hawthorne “The Minister’s Black Veil” à travers le prisme du symbolisme et de l’ambiguïté, en se concentrant sur le voile énigmatique du révérend Hooper. Ce voile sert de métaphore puissante pour évoquer les complexités du péché, de la stigmatisation et de la condition humaine, positionnant Hooper à la fois comme une crypte et un hiéroglyphe – un objet d’interprétation qui échappe à une compréhension définitive. Le récit explore l’impact du voile sur les relations sociales de Hooper, mettant en lumière les thèmes de la stigmatisation et l’aliénation qui découlent de la dissimulation. À l’aune de perspectives philosophiques, l’article soutient que le texte de Hawthorne invite les lecteurs à s’engager dans une recherche herméneutique du sens, le voile représentant une barrière composite entre identité et perception. L’article souligne l’interaction complexe entre visibilité, secret et quête de compréhension au sein de la tissure narrative du monde de Hawthorne.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

1“Where Hawthorne is known,” writes Herman Melville, “he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style,—a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated:—a man who means no meanings” (373). This assessment pinpoints an early critical misreading that, according to Melville, haunted Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reception. Despite the enduring fascination exerted by “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1835), its author has often remained a figure paradoxically obscured by the illusively simple access to his prose. According to Melville, the apparent transparency of Hawthorne’s narrative voice has led some to underestimate the philosophical and symbolic density of his texts and the “mystical depth of meaning” that pervades his words. Melville, however, saw in Hawthorne’s fiction a “great power of blackness” (374), rooted in theological and symbolic depths that exceed surface readings. It is in response to this tension—between interpretation and textual complexity—that the present contribution situates itself. Rather than attempting to decode the veil once and for all, this reading attends to the very resistance it poses to interpretation: the veil will not be read, but demands to be approached as an interpretive horizon, a structure of concealment and deferral. In this sense, Hawthorne’s literary project may be understood as a sustained meditation on the limits of legibility. As Davidson has observed, “Hawthorne’s writings are, taken together, the private hieroglyph of that subliminal world which all critics and biographers have been too afraid or too innocent to discover” (598). This formulation captures the essence of a fiction that both invites and frustrates hermeneutic pursuit, cloaking its symbolic landscapes in ambiguity while continually gesturing toward an invisible order. The figure of Reverend Hooper, with his unsettling veil and cryptic silence, emerges as a privileged node within this logic—a character who resists the transparency of allegory in favor of a deeper, hieroglyphic inscrutability.

2This article proceeds in three steps. First, it situates “The Minister’s Black Veil” within Hawthorne’s broader hermeneutic project by foregrounding the veil as a hieroglyphic object of interpretation. Second, it examines how the veil operates within a cryptic logic of concealment that both frustrates and sustains meaning. Third, it explores the social consequences of this opacity, showing how the veil produces stigma and alienation within Hooper’s community. The article also places “The Minister’s Black Veil” in dialogue with other Hawthornian texts—particularly The Scarlet Letter (1850), “The Birth-mark” (1843), and “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)—to argue that the instability of meaning is not an incidental motif, but one of the very grounds of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative universe.

3Critical responses to “The Minister’s Black Veil” have long underscored the tale’s enigmatic structure and its refusal to disclose stable meanings. From Edgar A. Dryden’s influential reading of the story as an allegory of interpretive anxiety to Judith P. Saunders’s exploration of the psychological opacity of Hooper’s behavior, scholars have consistently recognized the tale’s resistance to univocal interpretation. More recent contributions, such as those by Susan S. Williams and Erin C. Singer, have shifted attention to the veil’s contagious effect as a symbolic object, reading it as a socially inscribed sign of fear, exclusion, and projection. These readings situate Hawthorne’s narrative within a broader gothic logic of ambiguity and secrecy.

  • 1 A cenotaph is a monument or memorial that honours a person or a group whose remains are not present (...)

4“The Minister’s Black Veil” starts with an anecdote: a respected reverend, Mr. Hooper, decides, very suddenly, to cover his face with a veil that only shows his mouth and chin. The perplexed congregation wonders about the nature of this gesture: Hooper never answers, and the mystery will, somehow, never be solved. After years of exercise in his office, he dies and is buried without any revelation nor unveiling to solve the riddle that the veil has never ceased to maintain: the very space of his grave and the temporality of his death will not be enough to bring to light the secret that the Reverend has placed on his face—and imposed upon the community—throughout his life: “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” (Tales and Sketches 384). Hooper, in life as well as in death, stands for the complete absence of answer and, within him, there is the opening of the crypt into which so many readers and critics have embarked, pen in hand, in search of an answer. As Melville already intuited in his early praise of Hawthorne, his writing—which he seems to liken to Shakespeare’s “deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him,” offers “short, quick probings at the very axis of reality” (375), suggesting a style not of clear exposition, but of intuitive and hermetic gestures. This style resonates with the spectral opacity of Hooper himself. Hooper’s tomb would almost serve as a kind of cenotaph1 pointing to an absolute void of answer: a cenotaph of sorts since what is lacking is not the corpse, but the answer it could provide. Hooper embodies that which does not answer the question, though being imbued with meaning: he is a hieroglyph to be deciphered, a hieroglyph that “functions as the signal of . . . alterity” (Hall 170). He is the protagonist that everyone tries to understand, to whom everyone asks questions, and who, in response, only offers the chasm of silence: “it is because we all of us know of [the] sombre power [of the unsettling force of silence] and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence” (Maeterlinck 8), a fear which is experienced by Hooper’s followers at several points in the story. Hooper hovers between the logic of the crypt and that of the hieroglyph: the crypt may be understood as a hidden chamber, a secret folded within another space and rigorously walled off, where what is concealed is preserved precisely through its inaccessibility. The veil does not determine where Hooper belongs, but perhaps rather turns him into a monster of impenetrability, making him both a crypt and a hieroglyph.

5A hieroglyph is a symbol used in ancient Egyptian writing and, by extension, in Anatolian scripts. It refers to any sign that uses figures or ideograms. The figurative sense of the word hieroglyph, meaning something obscure or enigmatic rather than the Egyptian symbol, emerged in the late seventeenth century. The word is composed of the Greek hieros, meaning “sacred,” and a derivative of the verb gluphein, which means “to carve” or “to engrave.” “Hieroglyph” thus refers to a “sacred writing.” One might imagine standing before an Egyptian tomb where the inscriptions appear too carefully arranged to be taken as mere decoration. In the same way, the narrative of the veil invites us to perceive that the veil is not just a piece of cloth, but a sign that gestures beyond itself. Once one becomes aware that there is more beyond the apparent simplicity of the veil, the search for meaning begins, as well as the attempt—without knowing from whom or from what answers shall be obtained—to interrogate the very texture of the narrative and the layers of signification it conceals. This, perhaps, is what Hawthorne seeks to do with his readers: to turn them into sense-seeking interpreters drawn into the hermeneutic dimension that permeates the text, as the subtitle of the tale, “a parable,” already suggests. As John T. Irwin observes, “For Hawthorne and Melville, the ambiguous character of the hieroglyphics was their prime significance” (239): the primary meaning of the hieroglyph is precisely its ambiguous character—a character that disturbs all linguistic stability and settlement. Its essence and destination are ambiguity itself.

6Thus, on the one hand, the hieroglyph may be taken as a sign whose meaning is already determined, but one that deliberately conveys this meaning through the medium of ambiguity. On the other hand, it may be understood not as a single decipherable sign, but as part of a larger system whose very structure remains obscure, and whose effect is precisely to generate ambiguity in those who attempt to read it. The fact remains that in both cases, for Hawthorne, the primary meaning of the hieroglyph is—through the powerful ambivalence that constitutes its main characteristic—to be able to produce almost all possible meanings, for lack of being able to be deprived of meaning: “The hieroglyphics were the linguistic analogue of an enigmatic external world whose shape was various enough to sustain almost any interpretation that man projected on it in the act of knowing” (Irwin 239). If ambiguity seems to be the obstacle between the reader and meaning, it offers the possibility of embarking on an exercise beyond simple reading—that is, a literal or purely surface-level interpretation that denies the veil’s symbolic complexity: the Hawthornian worlds are hieroglyphic and offered to interpretive knowledge. Here is what might await a certain number of critical thoughts that face the veil of Hooper, whether it be those of a reader or a protagonist of the tale: the search for meaning.

7The hermeneutic drive to extract meaning from symbolic forms gestures toward a deeper dimension within Hawthorne’s semiotic imagination. As Millicent Bell observes,

Like a rhetorician, Hawthorne has labelled his subjects as though they were figures of speech in a spoken or written text. But, of course, these types, emblems, tokens, and hieroglyphs are not really supposed to be products of the human imagination. They belong to the category of privileged signs deriving from a transcendent presence. They are “written” by a spiritual force which expresses itself in the secret language of appearances. (12)

What is at stake here is not merely the poetic function of the symbol, but its ontological status: Hawthorne’s figures—particularly the hieroglyph—do not simply signify, they testify. They partake in a discourse where meaning is not constructed but always un-veiling, inscribed within a sacred order that exceeds human cognition. In this sense, his emblematic language becomes the site of an encounter with alterity—an interface between the visible world and the invisible grammar that underwrites it. The hieroglyph, far from being a mere aesthetic trope, emerges as a metaphysical residue, the trace of a presence that writes through absence, demanding to be read precisely because it withholds itself. This back-and-forth movement—at once revelation and withdrawal—finds an analogue in another figure that haunts and permeates Hawthorne’s symbolic imagination: the crypt. Whereas the hieroglyph foregrounds the proliferation of meaning through ambiguity, the crypt insists on the opacity of what must remain sealed and concealed. Taken together, these two figures shed light on Hawthorne’s semiotic and linguistic practice.

8What emerges from the interplay between the hieroglyph and the crypt is a conceptual structure that frames Hawthorne’s narrative world. Both imply a depth beneath the surface: the crypt conceals what must remain unperceived, while the hieroglyph manifests a linguistic form or entity that defers its meaning. Yet, this dynamic of ambiguous depth also calls for its opposite: the temptation to see the veil as nothing more than what it presents—an opaque surface without depth or implication. This is where the logic of tautology comes into play: the refusal of interpretation, the reduction of the visible to itself. Such a gaze, when directed at Hooper, does not remain neutral—it produces stigmatization, turning ambiguity into suspicion and the illegible into the socially excluded. The veil, therefore, operates as a threshold where meaning is at once proposed, postponed, and potentially refused. This article explores that threshold, offering a reading of Hawthorne’s fabric—literal and figurative—as a space where concealment, ambiguity, hermeneutic desire, and social distancing converge and meet around one man.

9In reading The Scarlet Letter alongside “The Minister’s Black Veil,” we might wonder whether Hawthorne had some knot to untie. Still, in both cases, he turns fabric into many things, but nothing that is, strictly speaking, decipherable. In the first case, he weaves a world on which a letter proliferates; in the second case, he somehow creates a world out of a veil upon which a silent blackness proliferates and conceals a world upon which a silent darkness abounds, without ever mentioning sin. Just as the letter “A” operates as a surface onto which multiple meanings are projected, the veil functions as a comparable hieroglyphic sign: “If the A functions within the context of the romance as a hieroglyph, if it accrues its meanings through various points of view, then it may be immune, as Hawthorne had previously stated in the ‘Preface,’ to unravelling, and hence to analysis” (Diehl 666). The veil too resists univocal deciphering: it defers resolution, eludes final interpretation, and proliferates significations within a hermeneutic field governed by ambiguity and secrecy.

10In all this, Hawthorne seems to play a game of retention, and he does not spare Hooper who, “ghost-like” on several occasions (Tales and Sketches 374), surrounds himself with a supernatural, spectral aura, as if leaving the world of the living to better enter that of the dead. Or perhaps he even enters that of the demon, if we follow Max Picard’s idea that “[i]n silence there is present not only the power of healing and friendship but also the power of darkness and terror, that which can erupt from the underground of silence, the power of death and evil” (49). The narration shows the body and presence of Hooper as an entity that questions the very nature of its human integrity, showing to the world the power that a simple cloth can contain. The veil becomes far more than just an anodyne accessory: it fractures Hooper’s bodily wholeness, splitting his face—and, with it, his identity—into what is visible but also and at the same time, what becomes invisible. Hooper then integrates the realms of the knowable and the unknowable. By concealing his face and all that a face ordinarily reveals, the veil interrupts the most immediate form of human communication, reducing Hooper to a physical presence whose internal world remains inaccessible. More than just concealing his face, Hooper is secreting it. Hence the incompleteness of his corporeality becomes that of his persona: Hooper’s presence gradually shifts from that of an embodied man to that of a signifier, caught between flesh and symbol. The veil does not simply cover and conceal—rather, it alters the unity of the human form, imposing an unresolved tension between flesh and fabric. This tension, conveyed by the presence of the fabric on Hooper’s face, is that of his very disfigurement; and because of this piece of fabric “[Hooper] effectively prevents members of his community from observing, monitoring, and interpreting his gaze . . . . Since those around him are deprived of crucial physical cues, they are unable to form satisfactory hypotheses concerning Hooper’s inner world” (Saunders 423). In the narrative, Hawthorne seems to be using the veil to dramatize the fragility of human integrity, showing how easily the body, and with it the self, is fragmented, and can become spectral—even allegorical—when subjected to silence and concealment.

11This tension between body and symbol—between the visible surface and the weight of meaning projected upon it—also feeds other tales by Hawthorne. “The Birth-mark,” in particular, offers a compelling mirror to “The Minister’s Black Veil,” as it stages a comparable anxiety about the human body as a site of hermeneutic excess. In “The Birth-mark,” Hawthorne interrogates the desire to render signs transparent. Its protagonist, Aylmer, seeks to remove a small mark from his wife Georgiana’s cheek, perceiving it not as a trivial imperfection, but as a symbolic flaw obstructing ideal beauty. As in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” a bodily detail becomes a hieroglyphic site of anxiety, overdetermined by the hermeneutic projections of those who behold it. Hooper’s veil inspires fear because it resists meaning; Georgiana’s mark inspires terror because it invites too much of her husband’s madness. Both narratives dramatize the danger of forcing legibility onto what Hawthorne constructs as essentially ambiguous. Where Hooper’s community recoils from a sign they cannot decipher, Aylmer destroys what he believes he has finally read as a moral flaw, an essential imperfection and as an obstacle to divine perfection. The outcome, in both cases, is the same: the loss of the human subject. The allegorical impulse becomes fatal when it seeks to collapse the tension between symbol and flesh. Thus, Hawthorne’s fiction repeatedly exposes the violence latent in interpretive absolutism—not only the refusal to live with uncertainty, but the tragic urge to resolve it. If Hooper withdraws from the gaze to preserve the ambiguity of his sign, Aylmer’s tragedy lies in his effort to resolve it. Together, these tales suggest that Hawthorne does not merely allegorize the instability of meaning but reveals how the compulsion to fix meaning may itself become a source of narrative and ontological crisis.

12To focus again on “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the veil also works as a narrative tool that opens the scope of the tale’s subtitle: “a parable.” Rather than simply illustrating its parabolic nature, it draws the entire text into the hermeneutic contingencies of its construction. Through its textile motif, Hawthorne initiates the allegorical dimension of the tale, while Hooper, in contrast, embodies its otherness—he becomes the enigmatic figure through which this allegory unfolds. Both author and character engage with the veil in distinct ways, each attributing to it a particular function. These differing uses suggest that their respective understandings of the veil diverge according to how they each mobilize it.

13The interplay between concealment and interpretation makes it possible to read the veil not only as a material object, but as a signifying surface—a kind of place where linguistic modalities arise: like language, the veil functions through context and usage; its meaning does not reside in an essential truth but emerges from how it is deployed within the narrative. Wittgenstein writes that “a meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it. For it is what we learn when the word is incorporated into our language” (fragment 61); “that is why there exists a correspondence between the concepts ‘rule’ and ‘meaning’” (fragment 62). This refers to his notion of the language game, in which meaning is not rooted in “purity” nor in any ideal reference, but in use and context. The connection between rule and meaning highlights that it is not some ideal purity of language that determines meaning, but the patterns of use that give words their sense. Thus, either we choose to think that Hooper does not know how to “use” the fabric or, on the contrary, that he does: he adjusts the fabric and its meaning in response to what it produces in a congregational context.

14In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Hooper’s veil has various functions and particularly contributes to the preacher’s mystification in the eyes of his flock: “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). The veil extends its influence over the whole persona of Hooper by presenting itself as a kind of wall between the outside and what is behind it; the veil somehow removes the face of the character: “‘I can’t really feel as if good Mr. Hooper’s face was behind that piece of crape,’ said the sexton” (372). The face withdraws itself, giving way to uncertainty—to an undecidability that suspends and problematizes Hooper’s integrity. His face fades not simply by disappearing, but because, in concealing it, he paradoxically reveals that there is something to conceal. He shows a hidden face—a face that insists on its own withdrawal—making visible the very act of hiding and speaking from within a cache, a recess or chamber of secrecy that, like a crypt, stores what must remain unseen, yet continues to exert its presence from within, a cache which, in many respects, breaks the worldly bonds that Hooper, as a minister, is supposed to maintain with his congregation.

15This cache, where concealment comes into being, reveals more than just the secret it contains—something carried by the simple artifice of a piece of cloth. This cache is a crypt: “The crypt is . . . an architecture, an artifact: of a place comprehended within another but rigorously separated from it, isolated” where “the grounds are so disposed as to disguise and to hide: something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds” (Abraham and Torok xiv). Such is the omnipotence of the double fold. It envelops the relation between the physical and the metaphysical in an enigmatic layering. In this juxtaposition of the veil—at once upon the body and upon the soul—emerges the power of the façade-veil which, far from transmitting a legible expression, effaces Hooper’s face into a penumbra of unreadable signs. His features are no longer revealed but displaced into a spectral register, producing only shadowy expressions that resist recognition. Hawthorne underlines this opacity when he writes that “[the veil] threw its obscurity between him and the holy page, as he read the Scriptures” (373). Not only does the veil darken his relation to the Word, but it also interrupts the luminous immediacy of expression, inserting obscurity where one would expect revelation. The Hawthornian fold, as if draped all around, extinguishes the horizon of plain and obvious perception. Hawthorne thus blurs, again and always, the modalities of clarity and darkness in the ambiguous world of the chiaroscuro so dear to his writing. Hooper is a man who shows of himself something other than a body for the world to see, something other than a face: rather than presenting what the uncovered face displays of identity, expression, communication—because it is through the very face that the voice sets forth—Hooper offers of his face everything that hides behind this veil as immutable as the thick wall of a rampart.

16Wearing a black veil, Hooper begins his first sermon whose subject is sin and its “sad mysteries” (373). He exhibits what the nakedness of the veil has been, intransitively, concealing. For the Puritans, one is born a sinner: “Hooper need not have committed any specific sin,” since “for the hardened Puritan, his humanity was sinful enough” (Morsberger qtd. in Niemeyer 125). His naked face had already been in the act of concealing. Nudity, in turn, is concealed by the veil which, for its part, shows that there is something that hides behind it: a cache, a crypt. Readers as well as Hooper’s community come to understand that he is a secretive man, whose secret remains to be deciphered, and thus he imbues himself, in this kind of interplay between revelation and hieroglyphic concealment, with a hieratic aura.

17This interplay, however, also points to the visual and discursive paradox the veil embodies. The veil, as non-image, operates not outside representation, but at its critical threshold. Neither iconographic nor symbolically stabilized, it nonetheless demands interpretive attention, and in this very movement produces what might be described as an inverted ekphrasis. If, as Joan Curbet Soler notes, Hawthorne’s work is concerned with “surfaces, screens, or visual projections” (175), then the veil functions precisely as such a surface—material, but resistant to depiction, offering no content other than the potentiality of meaning. It is not the description of an artwork that constitutes its ekphrastic moment, but the projection of discursivity onto a visual absence. This aligns with the modality of notional ekphrasis, insofar as any attempt to read the veil as aesthetic presupposes an imaginary process of perceiving it as a sort of “anti-artwork.” In contrast to the invented artworks of The Faerie Queene, which “interrogate . . . the limits both of art and of the linguistic representation of art” (176), “The Minister’s Black Veil” radicalizes this interrogation by presenting not an image, but an object whose resistance to figuration gives rise to an interpretive excess—a continuous displacement of meaning sustained by the very hermeneutic and cryptic drive it elicits. Here is one of the first effects of the veil, one of its “rules,” to borrow Wittgenstein’s terminology: the veil, this wall or screen that “seem[s] to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely conceal[s] his features, except the mouth and chin” (372), creates, in Hooper, a multiple set of interiorities and externalities that would be very difficult to integrate into Wittgenstein’s meaning-ful manual. Hooper changes the rules of the language game and, even, of representation.

18However, Wittgenstein had the merit of showing that the veil veils, and that if we want it to accomplish more, the meaning of the word would have to be broadened. The text does it for us. The veil is this “unaccountable phenomenon” that suddenly turns Reverend Hooper into “something singular” (372). The narrative spectralizes him, but also renders him illegible: “He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face” (372). This veil is described not only as a “mysterious emblem” (373)—a conventional, visible sign—but also as a “symbol” and a “type” (378). As a symbol, it is shaped by the text itself, pointing beyond the visible; as a type, it carries religious overtones, prefiguring or echoing a spiritual dimension. The veil is the medium from which a textual fog emerges. The texture of the veil is endowed with a thickening of its material that extends to the field of reading and meaning in that it eventually undergoes the effects of a sort of strategy of illegibility; it becomes the place where reading is blurred from the start, in an opacity, or obscurity, peculiar to the emergence of an interpretative necessity, inviting readers to consider it as an object whose aura invites the hermeneutic mind to awaken and rise.

19Hooper’s veil does not merely conceal—it resists. Not only the gaze, but causality itself recoils from its surface. If meaning lies beneath, it is not accessible through inquiry, but only through divine judgment, at the end of time. In this, the veil becomes the emblem of an epistemology of deferral. As Lydia Fash writes, the tale’s hermeneutic frustration “expresses the inscrutability of Puritan election” (232), wherein “all Calvinists bear a metaphoric veil, an unreadable symbol of their election or damnation” (233). Thus, Hooper must “work to maintain the veil’s inscrutability” (233), refusing all causal explanation, even as the town—and reader—scramble to re-inscribe the symbol into a familiar logic of transgression and guilt. Hawthorne’s appended note on Joseph Moody, the historical figure who veiled himself after accidentally killing a beloved friend, functions precisely as such temptation: a chronicle meant to soothe the interpretive ache by anchoring it to a deed. Yet, Hawthorne explicitly warns the reader that Moody’s veil did not carry the same significance as Hooper’s. Hooper’s veil is not an index of sin, but a symbol of that which cannot be indexed: the unknowable grammar of divine judgment. The story thus allegorizes its own illegibility. As Edgar A. Dryden observes, “our situation as readers of ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ is allegorically expressed by the situation of the characters in the story” (145). The text folds our hermeneutic inquietude into its own structure.

20This unreadable “phenomenon” (372), however, inevitably invites interpretation. The Hawthornian world seems to welcome such possibilities and contingencies with ease—as if beckoning the reader to decipher Hooper as yet another hieroglyph, encrypted within a network of moral riddles. Having thus covered his face with an obscure thing, Hooper seems to become the object of interpretation towards which eyes and voices turn:

Strange and bewildered looks repaid [Hooper] for his courtesy. . . . He returned, therefore, to the parsonage, and, at the moment of closing the door, was observed to look back upon the people, all of whom had their eyes fixed upon the minister. (374)

An interplay of gazes unfolds between Hooper and his followers. Hooper suffers from all the critical “hermeneutic” looks thrown at him:

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, but only that Mr. Hooper’s eyes were so weakened by the midnight lamp, as to require a shade. (374)

The fixity of the believers’ gaze differs in nature and according to how one person or another experiences it. Indeed, for some it is a fixity that makes them reach beyond the materiality of the double-fold veil (“it was but a double fold of crape” [378]), beyond which there is a mystery. For others, this fixity is none other than that of a pure surface, whose superficiality, artificiality, would prove the absence of any mystery in favor of a simple eye discomfort, the incapacity of seeing beyond the surface which Didi-Huberman calls “the tautology of vision.” The double pleating of the veil thus reveals two categories of thought that Georges Didi-Huberman describes: some people, when confronted with the visible presence of a tomb, adopt a tautological perspective that reduces the object to what it visibly is, rejecting any hidden dimension, transformation, or temporality. This refusal of depth leads to a kind of cynical indifference. In contrast, another response consists in transforming the act of seeing into a practice of belief, of faith: a practice through which the visible is interpreted as a sign of an invisible presence that grants meaning beyond the pure appearance of the tomb (19-21). This exhibition, of faith or its absence, before the tomb, unfolds some issues of the veil that seems to summon two ways of believing—or not believing. The first possibility makes one focus on the surface of the veil and, in the refusal they make to penetrate “the work of time or metamorphosis” (Didi-Huberman 19), end up in a sort of nihilism, denying any faith momentum. The other possibility is an impulse of faith that would have allowed them, rather than collide with the materiality and surface of the veil, to indulge in the practice of belief allowing language to triumph over the modalities of the eye. For those who believe in the mystery of the veil, this act of faith grants access to the otherness of meaning—a space where one may intervene in the semantic contingencies so central to Hawthornian texts. The possibility of positioning his protagonists according to these two modes of thinking largely reflects that which positions its readership either in this tautological quasi-nihilism, or in the complete and interpretative faith of what is woven under the crepe, or on it. However, this possibility of a twofold turn on the forking paths of thought would not have been possible without positioning in front of the veil, from the very beginning, those in favor of tautology on the one hand, and the faith initiates on the other hand.

21Here we seem to be returning to the allegorical substance of the text—the title of which explicitly states and announces the parabolic density of the narrative—, the substance around which everything seems to fold up—or unfold—despite the disturbing strangeness of the repulsive artifact that both repels and attracts the actual—that is, the realm of tangible reality. This duality—between repulsion and attraction—operates through its symbolic projections which unfold within that very neutral territory Hawthorne evocatively defines in the preface of The Scarlet Letter: a space “between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (29). It is within this liminal land of narrative—suspended between the concretions of the present and the phantasmagorias of the imaginary—that the veil acquires its enigmatic power, and where Hawthorne invites his readers to dwell, confronting the uncertain obviousness that veils, rather than reveals, meaning.

22The veil in Hawthorne’s tale operates as a surface onto which meaning is not discovered, but projected. Its power does not lie in what it reveals but in what it provokes. The community surrounding Hooper does not respond to an act of sin, but to the possibility that the veil must conceal something terrible. Hawthorne’s tale is animated by “the assumptions a community makes about Parson Hooper’s decision to wear a veil” (Helms 63), and by the cultural memory of the veil as a gothic emblem—a “symbol of hidden horror” (63). The horror is not in the veil itself, but in the interpretive vacuum it opens, which the townspeople—and the reader—rush to fill. This tension mirrors an aspect of aesthetic distance: the “utmost decrease of distance without its disappearance” (Heller 3). The veil unsettles not by clarity, but by proximity—by how close it brings the abyss of meaning, while never letting it resolve. It is the aesthetic of the near-yet-withheld—a disturbance calibrated on the threshold of the visible and the knowable.

23For this to emerge, it was necessary for Reverend Hooper to break, through his veil, the unity of space, the orientation and directedness of his face towards others, by creating a rupture with much of his social relations. He goes into a sort of exile in his own land, right from the beginning of the story:

Strange and bewildered looks repaid him for his courtesy. None, as on former occasions, aspired to the honor of walking by their pastor’s side. Old Squire Saunders, doubtless by an accidental lapse of memory, neglected to invite Mr. Hooper to his table, where the good clergyman had been wont to bless the food, almost every Sunday since his settlement. (Tales and Sketches 374)

And he does so again shortly before the story ends:

But with the multitude, good Mr. Hooper was irreparably a bugbear. He could not walk the street with any peace of mind, so conscious was he that the gentle and timid would turn aside to avoid him, and that others would make it a point of hardihood to throw themselves in his way. The impertinence of the latter class compelled him to give up his customary walk at sunset to the burial ground; for when he leaned pensively over the gate, 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. It grieved him, to the very depth of his kind heart, to observe how the children fled from his approach. (380)

It would seem that one of the core elements of the narrative, beyond the easy notion of sin which could serve as a structural motif, is the phenomenon of stigmatization—a notion the narration carefully avoids, just as the narrative of The Scarlet Letter reduces the word “adultery” to its initial, the letter A. This phenomenon is not unique to Hooper: as Pamela Jordan has noted, in both Till We Have Faces (written by C. S. Lewis) and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the veil catalyzes a transformation in public perception. In both cases, the character who dons the veil becomes “unnatural” (5) in the eyes of others, provoking discomfort, fear, and speculation. In Lewis’s work, Orual’s veil inspires horror and awe in her court, while Hooper’s veil inspires gossip, suspicion, and metaphysical dread among his parishioners. The veil projects an altered, often monstrous persona—ghostlike, dreadful, or unknowable—not because of what it reveals, but because of the void it opens. Elaine Barry observes that Hooper’s community projects their own fears onto him, ranging “from pettiness to cruelty” (17), and the transformation the veil enacts is thus twofold: it distorts the image of the wearer in the public eye, while simultaneously isolating and reshaping the self who wears it. The social exile—note however that he still assumes his clerical office—from which Reverend Hooper suffers is not merely a matter of general social distancing, that is, not just the subtle, ambient withdrawal of others in response to discomfort or unease. It is also, and more strikingly, a move-away, a marked and visible distancing, one that the veil itself inscribes upon his figure and imposes on him, in the eyes of all, like a stigma:

While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind—in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma. (Goffman 2)

The stigmatization is such that Reverend Hooper loses parts of his humanity. Because of his “ghost-like” appearance (374), and the spectral aura that the rumor of his consortium with ghosts and fiends at “the burial ground” (380) certainly nurtures, Hooper is ceaselessly brought to the borders of revenance—but a peculiar kind of revenance, shaped not only by his ghost-like presence, but also by the stigma itself, which casts him into a realm that is always hostile and inhospitable, and marks him with a preternatural aura: “We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one, and at the same time to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast, such as ‘sixth sense,’ or ‘understanding’” (Goffman 5). The veil itself inscribes upon Hooper’s figure a mark of exclusion, imposing on him—and in the eyes of all—a permanent state of anomaly. While not explicitly named, this form of rejection operates as a sort of “social quarantine” (Williams 152)—a symbolic exile that occurs once his face is coupled to the fabric of the veil: the children’s fear, the villagers’ avoidance, and the spectral aura surrounding him all contribute to the transformation of Hooper into a locus of social dread. As Susan S. Williams argues about Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, the text foregrounds a “strange, contagious fear” (The Scarlet Letter qtd. in Williams 148) that spreads socially, despite the absence of any physical contagion. The mere visibility of a stigmatizing sign is enough to generate avoidance and suspicion. Referring to the Scarlet Letter, Williams writes:

Like the people quarantined in a house with a blood-red flag, Hester experiences her isolation as a “spell” that “tak[es] her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclose[es] her in a sphere by herself.” Even once she begins to roam the streets, she, like the townspeople hurrying down the streets during an epidemic, “never raised her head to receive [the] greeting” of those who “were resolute to accost her,” instead laying “her finger on the scarlet letter, and pass[ing] on.” (154)

In this sense, Hooper’s veil, like Hester’s embroidered “A,” is not only a personal sign of concealment, but also a socially contagious object, radiating exclusion, guilt, and a fear that seems to infect the surrounding community with its ambiguous silence.

24This hermeneutic logic is not confined to “The Minister’s Black Veil.” It recurs throughout Hawthorne’s fiction, where signs and silences alike unsettle meaning and provoke anxiety. A particularly resonant example is “Young Goodman Brown,” a tale that similarly hinges on the destabilizing power of ambiguous experience and the community’s reaction to it. A comparable dynamic of symbolic ambiguity and social projection can be observed in “Young Goodman Brown,” another of Hawthorne’s emblematic tales of moral opacity. Much like Hooper, the titular character in “Young Goodman Brown” undergoes an experience whose status remains unresolved—was it dream or reality?—yet which radically alters his relationship to the community. Brown’s nocturnal journey into the forest ends with a revelation of universal depravity, but Hawthorne pointedly refrains from establishing the ontological truth of this vision. As a result, Brown, upon returning to Salem, no longer sees his fellow townspeople as fellow believers but as hypocrites cloaked in an illusion of virtue. The tale dramatizes, like “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the power of internal experience to rupture communal bonds and to install a hermeneutics of suspicion at the heart of social life. In both cases, the protagonist becomes alienated not by a confirmed transgression but by an ambiguous sign—the veil in Hooper’s case, the unspoken memory of a vision in Brown’s. These signs do not signify guilt per se, but rather generate suspicion by remaining illegible. The unknowability of meaning becomes, paradoxically, a catalyst for social isolation: just as Hooper’s veil is read as a moral statement by his congregation, Brown’s silence and estrangement mark him as suspect. Both tales thus explore the theological and psychological consequences of symbolic opacity, suggesting that, in a community structured by Puritan vigilance, that which cannot be accounted for may prove more dangerous than open sin.

*

25As is the case of the embroidered “A” in The Scarlet Letter, the minister’s black veil could well be the stigmatizing inking of sin and secrecy. The Hawthornian writing of stigmatization performs its narrative across the unfolding modalities of meaning and consequence that stigmatization entails. The story of The Scarlet Letter undoes the name of adultery, and does it in the eyes of the world, just in the same way the narration of the veil reveals the evidence of a monstration made monstrous. Paradoxically, by hiding adultery in the novel and the face of Hooper in the tale, both stories reveal the play of concealment that defines and leads the narrative. As Erin C. Singer observes, the veil and the scarlet letter both function as vectors of ideological contagion: they are not mere signs of transgression, but ambiguous surfaces upon which “collective anxiety” (33) is projected and proliferates. Their illegibility is what renders them infectious—they disturb the symbolic economy not by what they show, but by the interpretive instability they initiate. Thus, each operates as a material anomaly that unsettles meaning, an entity whose opacity sustains gossip, fear, and the compulsion to decipher. They “infect the town” (35), Singer writes, precisely by refusing semantic resolution. In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” what emerges is not a revelation of content, but a staging of the veil as content, where the narrative orchestrates the paradox of unveiling through concealment. Through what could be called a language game, the narrative does not so much point towards a truth hidden behind the veil as it imbues the latter with the modalities of meaning-production. Hawthorne’s work thus resists resolution: it constructs, through the very act of narrative, a hieroglyphic—labyrinthine?—structure in which interpretation is both invited and endlessly deferred. The veil becomes, in this sense, not only the object of interpretation but the condition of possibility for any hermeneutics. In the very resistance to closure that it constantly maintains, the tale draws its power not from the answer it pretends to hold, but in the obstinacy and the refusal it unfolds and displays as to the expectations one has. This is perhaps why Herman Melville writes that “to glean after this man, is better than to be in at the harvest of others,” insisting that Hawthorne “expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him” (382). In other words, Hawthorne does not offer resolution, but slow sedimentation. His texts resist immediate deciphering and require, instead, a reader willing to remain in suspension, to inhabit the very tension between opacity and sense. The veil, thus, is not merely a metaphor for concealment: it is an emblem for the hermeneutic labor that Hawthorne demands.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Foreword by Jacques Derrida. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Print.

Barry, Elaine. “Beyond the Veil: A Reading of Hawthorne’s ‘The Minister’s Black Veil.’” Studies in Short Fiction 17.1 (Winter 1980): 15-20. Print.

Bell, Millicent. “The Obliquity of Signs: ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” The Massachusetts Review 23.1 (Spring 1982): 9-26. Print.

Benoit, Pierre. Levinas pas à pas. Paris: Ellipses, 2022. Print.

Davidson, Edward H. Rev. of The Death of the Artist: A Study of Hawthorne’s Disintegration, by Rudolph von Abele. American Literature 27.4 (Jan 1956): 596-98. Print.

Didi-Huberman, George. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992. Print.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. “Re-Reading The Letter: Hawthorne, the Fetish, and the (Family) Romance.” New Literary History 19.3 (Spring 1988): 655-73. Print.

Dryden, Edgar A. “Through a Glass Darkly: ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ As Parable.” New Essays on Hawthorne’s Major Tales. Ed. Millicent Bell. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. 133-50. Print.

Fash, Lydia G. “The Chronicle and the Reckoning: A Temporal Paradox in Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.” Narrative 21.2 (May 2013): 221-42. Print.

Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin, 2022. Print.

Hall, Julie E. “Abstracts for MLA Convention, January 3–6, 2013, Boston Talks at the Hawthorne Sessions. ‘Wild Man/Cultured Man: Native Americans and Scottish Highlanders in The House of the Seven Gables.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 38.2 (Fall 2012): 170. Print.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Minister’s Black Veil.” 1836. Tales and Sketches. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Library of America, 1982. 371-84. Print.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Ed. Leland S. Person. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. Print.

Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. Print.

Helms, Whitney. “Aesthetics, Artistry, and Gothicism: George Eliot and ‘The Lifted Veil.’” George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies 62/63 (Sept. 2012): 49-65. Print.

Irwin, John T. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Print.

Jordan, Pamela L. “The Enigmatic Veil: A Study of the Use of a Veil in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Minister’s Black Veil.’” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society 27.2 (Summer 2003): 3-12. Print.

Maeterlinck, Maurice. The Treasure of the Humble. Trans. Alfred Sutro. London: George Allen, Ruskin House, 1897. Project Gutenberg. Web. 11 May 2025.

Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales. Ed. James McIntosh. Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 370-85. Print.

Morsberger, Robert E. “‘The Minister’s Black Veil: ‘Shrouded in a Blackness, Ten Times Black.’” The New England Quarterly 46 (Sept. 1973): 454-63. Print.

Niemeyer, Marc. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales. Neuilly-sur-Seine: Atlande, 2024. Print.

Picard, Max. The World of Silence. Trans. Stanley Godman. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988. Web. 11 May 2025.

Saunders, Judith P. “Hawthorne’s Theory of Mind: An Evolutionary Psychological Approach to ‘The Minister’s Black Veil.’” Style 46.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2012): 420-38. Print.

Singer, Erin C. “Gossip as Contagion in Hawthorne’s ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ and The Scarlet Letter.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 47.1 (2021): 26-43. Print.

Soler, Joan Curbet. “The Ekphrastic Moment: Art, Image, and Identity in Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842).” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 46.2 (2020): 174-85. Print.

Williams, Susan S. “‘A Strange, Contagious Fear’: Scarlet Letters and Shame in the Time of Coronavirus.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 47.1 (2021): 144-66. Print.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Eds. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969. Web. 12 May 2025.

Haut de page

Notes

1 A cenotaph is a monument or memorial that honours a person or a group whose remains are not present, often because they are buried elsewhere or have been lost. In contrast, a tomb is a physical burial site where a corpse is interred.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Romain Wong, « Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”: Hooper’s Hieroglyphics »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 213-230.

Référence électronique

Romain Wong, « Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”: Hooper’s Hieroglyphics »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 08 décembre 2025, consulté le 15 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4868

Haut de page

Auteur

Romain Wong

Université de Lille, CECILLE (ULR 4074)

Romain Wong is a PhD student in American literature, supervised by Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, and a member of CECILLE (ULR 4074). His research focuses on the motif of ruin in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His dissertation will most likely be titled “Nathaniel Hawthorne or the Writing of Ruin.”

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search