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THE MINISTER'S BLACK VEIL (Short story). Hawthorne, Nathaniel Literary Cavalcade. Sep2002, Vol. 55 Issue 1, p25. 3p. 1 Color Photograph, 1 Black and White Photograph. Article MINISTER'S Black Veil, The (Short story) Presents an excerpt of the short story 'The Minister's Black Veil.' 1395 0024-4511 7252437 Academic Search Complete SHORT STORY (EXCERPT)

THE MINISTER'S BLACK VEIL (SHORT STORY)

A minister covers his face to expose his shame IDENTITY IN HIDING Our identities are closely tied to our faces; it is how we identify each other. But what becomes of a person's identity when his face is obscured from the world at large? In “The Minister's Black Veil.” a minister chooses to keep his face hidden for the rest of his life, effectively preventing those around him from knowing him beyond their own speculations as to who he is, and what lies in his heart.

THE STORY SO FAR When the pastor of a small Connecticut town delivers a sermon on the subject of secret sin while wearing a black veil over his face, his frightened and strangely moved congregation fears he has gone mad. His wife, Elizabeth, is the only one with the courage to ask him about it. When she does, he says, “this dismal shade must separate me from the world,” but offers her no explanation. When she asks him to remove it, and he refuses, she says, “Then, farewell!”

SHE WITHDREW HER ARM FROM HIS GRASP, AND SLOWLY departed, pausing at the door, to give one long, shuddering gaze, that seemed almost to penetrate the mystery of the black veil. But, even amid his grief, Mr. Hooper smiled to think that only a material emblem had separated him from happiness, though the horrors, which it shadowed forth, must be drawn darkly between the fondest of lovers.

From that time no attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper's black veil, or, by a direct appeal, to discover the secret which it was supposed to hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice, it was reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the sober actions of men otherwise rational, and tinges them all with its own semblance of insanity. 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 grave-stones, 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, breaking up their merriest sports, while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive dread caused him to feel, more strongly than aught else, that a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so great, that he never willingly passed before a mirror, not stooped to drink at a still fountain, lest, in its peaceful bosom, he should be affrighted by himself. This was what gave plausibility to the whispers, that Mr. Hooper's conscience tortured him for some great crime too horrible to be entirely concealed, or otherwise than so obscurely intimated. Thus, from beneath the black veil, there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. It was said, that ghost and fiend consorted with him there. With self- shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium that saddened the whole world. Even the lawless wind, it was believed, respected his dreadful secret, and never blew aside the veil. But still good Mr. Hooper sadly smiled at the pale visages of the worldly throng as he passed by.

Among all its bad influences, the black veil had the one desirable effect, of making its wearer a very efficient clergyman. By the aid of his mysterious emblem for there was no other apparent cause—he became a man of awful power, over souls that were in agony for sin. His converts always regarded him with a dread peculiar to themselves, affirming, though but figuratively, that, before he brought them to celestial light, they had been with him behind the black veil. Its gloom, indeed, enabled him to sympathize with all dark afflictions. Dying sinners cried aloud for Mr. Hooper, and would not yield their breath till he appeared; though ever, as he stooped to whisper consolation, they shuddered at the veiled face so near their own. Such were the terrors of the black veil, even when Death had bared his visage! Strangers came long distances to attend service at his church, with the mere idle purpose of gazing at his figure, because it was forbidden them to behold his face. But many were made to quake ere they departed! Once, during Governor Belcher's administration, Mr. Hooper was appointed to preach the election sermon. Covered with his black veil, he stood before the chief magistrate, the council, and the representatives, and wrought so deep an impression, that the legislative measures of that year were characterized by all the gloom and piety of our earliest ancestral sway.

In this manner Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish. As years wore on, shedding their snows above his sable veil, he acquired a name throughout the New England churches, and they called him Father Hooper. Nearly all his parishioners, who were of mature age when he was settled, had been borne away by many a funeral: he had one congregation in the church, and a more crowded one in the church- yard; and having wrought so late into the evening, and done his work so well, it was now good Father Hooper's turn to rest.

Several persons were visible by the shaded candlelight, in the death-chamber of the old clergyman.

Natural connections he had none. But there was the decorously grave, though unmoved physician, seeking only to mitigate the last pangs of the patient whom he could not save. There were the deacons, and other eminently pious members of his church. There, also, was the Reverend Mr. Clark, of Westbury, a young and zealous divine, who had ridden in haste to pray by the bedside of the expiring minister. There was the nurse, no hired handmaiden of death, but one whose calm affection had endured thus long in secrecy, in solitude, amid the chill of age, and would not perish, even at the dying hour. Who, but Elizabeth! And there lay the hoary head of good Father Hooper upon the death-pillow, with the black veil still swathed about his brow and reaching down over his face, so that each more difficult gasp of his faint breath caused it to stir. All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world: it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and still it lay upon his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity.

AUTHOR FILE WHO NATHANIEL HATHORNE (NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE) BORN July 4, 1804, in Salem, Mass.

DIED May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, N.H.

EDUCATION Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. His classmates included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce.

FAMILY LIFE In 1842, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody. They had a daughter, Una, in 1844, whose behavior he incorporated into his portrayal of the daughter, Pearl, in The Scarlet Letter (1850). They also had a son, Julian, and another daughter, Rose.

COOL FRIENDS Hawthorne hung out with the Transcendentalists (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville), a group of writers who were trying to create a distinctly American body of literature in the years before the Civil War. This literature reflected their desire to redefine spirituality in a way that incorporated nature, as well as their own thoughts and ideas.

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~~~~~~~~ By Nathaniel Hawthorne

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