SOURCE: "The True Sight of Sin: Parson Hooper and the Power of Blackness," in The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales, Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 314-85.

In the following excerpt, Colacurcio explores the "moral history" as well as the religious context of "The Minister's Black Veil."

The case of Parson Hooper is more difficult than that of Goodman Brown—arguably it is the most difficult of all Hawthorne's cases of Puritan conscience.¹ On the one hand, "intrinsically," the text itself seems to thwart interpretation, as if neither Hooper nor Hawthorne quite understood the "ambiguity of sin or sorrow" in which he became enveloped. Rationalists might suspect obscurantism, and theorists discover indeterminacy; but perhaps the old ("New") critics were right, for once, to protest that the tendency to explain everything is simply wrong-headed; that, unlike the Emersonian universe, a Hawthorne text cannot be counted on to...