SOURCE: “Hawthorne's Black Veil: From Image to Icon,” in The CEA Critic, Vol. 55, No. 3, Spring-Summer, 1993, pp. 79-87.

In the following essay, Coale views “The Minister's Black Veil” as a work that develops in stages, noting the transformation of a “literal black crepe” to an “allegorical sign”before becoming a blasphemous icon.

In a recent issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, LEA Bertani Vozar Newman reviewed almost all the published criticism on Nathaniel Hawthorne's enigmatic “The Minister's Black Veil” (1836) and decided that the text of the tale served as a mirror for the reader, that each critic saw his or her own face reflected in the story.¹ What seems to be closer to the facts of the text itself, however, is that the mirror is opaque—that, as J. Hillis Miller has recently concluded, “The story is the unveiling of the possibility of the impossibility of unveiling” (51). Miller acknowledges...