SOURCE: “‘The Minister's Black Veil’: Concealing Moses and the Holy of Holies,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 131-38.

In the following essay, McCarthy illustrates how images of veils in the Bible can bring fresh interpretations to the role of Mr. Hooper and the narrator of “The Minister's Black Veil.”

Reverend Hooper, who mysteriously dons a black veil to the consternation of his congregation, has received unduly punitive treatment at the hands of some critics, while others have elevated him to patriarchal sainthood.¹ Richard Harter Fogle believes that Hooper is guilty of “perverse pride,” and is “sin-crazed”; William Bysshe Stein argues that Hooper is an “antichrist”; E. Earle Stibitz asserts that Hooper is “an unbalanced and unredeemed sinner”; and more recently, Michael J. Colacurcio, almost reluctantly, sees Hooper as a “sick-soul,” “sacrilegious,” “spiritually deranged and humanly out of control”—in short, “doomed.” At the opposite...