The Minister's Black Veil Summary

“The Minister’s Black Veil:” The Story of Mr. Hopper
The Minister’s Black Veil is considered a Gothic literature. It can be a Gothic Literature because Mr. Hopper starts wearing a black veil and the townspeople start to worry because they thought he committed a crime or possibly murdered someone. Wearing the black veil made everyone curious and wanted to find out what he was hiding from the townspeople.
The people murmur about Hooper’s dreadfully changed appearance, questioning if it is truly his face behind the veil or if he has lost his sanity. When Hooper walks to the pulpit, all eyes fixate on the blackveil. His sermon topic concerns the secret sins that people hide from their closest associations, even from their own consciousness, forgetting
But its chief significance lies not in these "readings," surely not in its "ultimate meaning," which may or may not be revealed, but in its power to stimulate such efforts and in the still more potent emotional effects it produces in those who behold it. Some of the townspeople are amazed, others awed; some are fearful or intimidated, others perplexed or defensively wise, while yet others are inspired or made hopeful. For all the emphasis on interpretive hypotheses--and there is much--there is as much or more on the accompanying emotional impact. And both, of course, are characteristic of the symbol, the latter more profoundly than the former. Symbols, as D. H. Lawrence remarks, "don't `mean something.' They stand for units of human feeling, human experience. A complex of emotional experience is a symbol. And the power of the symbol," like the power of the minister's veil, "is to arouse the deep emotional self, and the dynamic self, beyond comprehension" (Lawrence 158). The "strangest part of the affair," remarks a physician, "is the effect of this vagary, even on a sober-minded man like myself" (Hawthorne 41).
One of the lessons learned in The Minister’s Black Veil is that you can’t avoid the sin of secret sin because there will always be a consequence to our sins or secret faults. The veil can also be compared to man’s way of trying to hide the hideous
As the artist falls into isolation in the demanding task of its description, becoming the distanced judge of those whose judgmental detachment he condemns, so Hooper, in the obfuscation of his message, becomes tangled in what he would merely emblemize. Like the power of the purloined letter, hidden by a different sort of minister, the power of the symbol, as of the veil, lies not in its use but its concealment. "With the employment [of the letter]," Poe's narrator observes, "the power departs" (Poe 978). And similarly, the conclusive ascription of any given meaning to the veil or symbol drains the potency bonded to its mystery. By withholding until the moment of his death the presumed meaning of his symbol, Hooper maintains his lifelong grip upon his "readers," but at another price. For in concealing from them the secret of his veil, he turns the symbol into the moral reality it allegedly signifies. The minister's act implicates him in the crime of concealment that the veil symbolizes and condemns. The symbol has become its meaning, the artistic or symbolizing act a patch of the moral as well as existential darkness it illumines. It is in this sense among others that "a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crepe" (48). And it is