SOURCE: "Through a Glass Darkly: 'The Minister's Black Veil' as Parable," in New Essays on Hawthorne's Major Tales, edited by Millicent Bell, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 133-50.

In the following essay, Dryden considers "The Minister's Black Veil" as a fictitious parable rather than a fictionalized historic event

As a self-designated "romance-writer"¹ (149) Hawthorne was fascinated by the theoretical implications of the generic mark; the problem of generic designations, which is a central concern in his prefaces, appears even more explicitly in subtitled designations as in The Scarlet Letter: A Romance or "The Minister's Black Veil: A Parable," the generic denomination I intend to explore in this essay. What exactly does it mean to say that "The Minister's Black Veil" is a parable? What is the relation between the title and subtitle? To what extent can the subtitle be seen as an interpretive clue to the reader that will allow...