SOURCE: “Mr. Hooper's Vow,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2nd Quarter, 1975, pp. 93-102.

In the following essay, Reece demonstrates how it is possible to admire Mr. Hooper's vow to wear the veil while condemning the effects of this demonstration of Puritan religiosity.

“The Minister's Black Veil” (1836) is, even among the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, unusually complex in potentialities for meaning. Its power to suggest numerous and often contradictory interpretations is reflected in the fact that its critics are in wide disagreement concerning so fundamental a matter as whether the Reverend Mr. Hooper's act of donning the veil and his subsequent insistence that it never be removed result from marked personal failings or from unusual merit.¹ Perhaps the most significant critical challenge of the story is presented in the analysis by Richard Harter Fogle, who believes the minister's veil may be seen both as...