The Minister's Black Veil Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Glenn C. Altschuler

Critical Essay by Glenn C. Altschuler

SOURCE: “The Puritan Dilemma in ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1974, pp. 25-7.

In the following essay, Altschuler contends that “The Minister's Black Veil” represents one of Hawthorne's most explicit condemnations of the spiritual teachings and revivalism that fueled the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s.

Much of Hawthorne's “history” involves moral “tendency.” He takes doctrines that developed out of Puritanism, like Antinomianism and Separatism in “The Man of Adamant,” and carries them to their logical conclusion. They lead to solipsism; the young Roger Williams should have rejected communion with everyone, including his wife. Ann Hutchinson should have had an evening prayer meeting only with herself. But tendency is not always actuality, and despite the numbers of congregational separations following the Great Awakening, Puritanism did not die of the proliferation of Richard Digbys in its “reductive” left wing. “The Minister's Black Veil,”...
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