SOURCE: “The Veil of Words in ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 41-7.

In the following essay, German examines Hawthorne's careful use of puns in “The Minister's Black Veil,” which, he claims, underscore Mr. Hooper's alienation from God and man.

The anatomical workings of “The Minister's Black Veil” have so long been under the incisive explicatory knives of every type of critic that one might think the story, by now, scraped to the bone. The criticism, generally, has been sound. R. H. Fogle, playing the grand arbiter of good sense, asserts that many interpretations are possible when an author consciously works ambiguity as his principal organizational trope.¹ Still, perspicacious critics can have blindspots.

Little has been said, for instance, concerning Hawthorne's penchant for etymological punning, George Monteiro's brief discussion on the “motif-like use of the term mystery”² being an exception. An...