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Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” is regarded as one of the earliest and greatest American short stories. Like many of Hawthorne’s stories, this story is developed around a single symbol: the black veil that the Reverend Mr. Hooper wears to hide his face from the world. The nature of secret sin and humans’ fallen nature are the main theme. Hawthorne’s intended meaning with the tale has been the subject of considerable debate.. Some critics note that “Mr. Hooper is the type of the abnormal, 本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供who has lost the power of seeing life steadily and whole”.
They think the sin - crazed Hooper himself is “to outward gaze the gentlest sinful of men” and “his mistaken notion about the nature of evil prompt him to attempt the salvation of his fellow men by a method which seriously endangers his own salvation.” Critic William Bysshe Stein in 1955 even considered Hooper an antichrist. As to such kind of claims, I find it hard to agree. Even though Mr. Hooper fails to fulfill his responsibilities as a minister well, there is no evidence to show he deserves to be called an antichrist for he hasn’t done anything against the will of the holy Jesus. It’s true that Hooper fixes his eyes on the townspeople, hoping to help them expose their sins. But he cannot be defined as sin - crazed for this reason. The American author Nathaniel Hawthorne had an intricate relationship with the tradition of American Puritanism, with which both he and his Puritan ancestors were imbued in character and in belief, and yet his representative work The Scarlet Letter has always received an all-too-simple, one-dimensional critical response from most Chinese readers and critics, rendering it a bitter demonstration of and 本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供outright protest against the dehumanizing role of Puritan ethics and, by extension, that of Christian ethics in general. This paper attempts at a new reading of this much-misinterpreted work. By analyzing the novel’s dominant themes, the development of its major characters, the narrative voice, and even its honest criticism of the Puritan community, this paper is intended to reveal that, instead of assailing the Christian ethics, the novel expresses what is central to the ethical values based on the Christian Scripture: the universality of sin and guilt in spite of their various disguise, and the pity on and redemption of the human individuals as well as communities equally enslaved by sin.
The sin Mr. Hooper committed
Mr.Hooper’s deathbed remarks show that本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供 he intends the black veil
to symbolize the secret sin which all men “loathsomely treasure up”in their hearts. That he intended himself to typify mankind’s evil nature is clear enough, but the reason why he thought himself evil is not so clear.
We may infer from Hooper’s presence at the funeral on that Sunday that
perhaps he is responsible for the death of the young lady, because “at the instant when the clergyman’s features were disclosed, the corpse had
slightly shuddered”. But in fact,“a superstitious old woman was the only witness of this prodigy”. A couple of people said they saw “the minister
and the maiden’s spirit were walking hand in hand.”But this is just
their fantasy and no other evidence can support it. It’s reasonable to
think these words are used to add a little bit of mystery which is typical
of Hawthorne’s writing feature. Provided Hooper’s hidden sin is true, his
action of still comi