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The Veil of the Minister and Goodman Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories The Ministers Black Veil and Young Goodman Brown are two stories that are thick with allegory. Young Goodman Brown is a moral story which is told through the perversion of a common towns person. In Young Goodman Brown, Goodman Brown is a Puritan who lets his excessive pride in himself interfere with his relations with the community after he meets with the devil and causes him to live the life of an exile in his own community. The Ministers Black Veil is also a moral story that is told through the perversion of a Puritan religious leader. In The Ministers Black Veil, Parson Hooper is abashed of his own sin and attempts to disguise his sin with a black veil. In an ironic way, Parson Hooper and Goodman Brown are both wearing a veil of guilt to cover up their own sins.
This veil later becomes the main symbol of guilt, excessive pride, and hidden sins. What exactly is guilt? Guilt is remorseful awareness of having done something wrong. Goodman Brown and Parson Hooper are two men that are guilty of some type of wrong behavior.
Their guilt arrives from an act of sin. Young Goodman Brown begins when Faith, Browns wife, asks him not to go out on an errand to meet the devil. This errand later becomes the center of his guilt. Goodman Browns guilt is carried around with him like an invisible veil that will never uncover him. In the same way, Parson Hooper has a veil that covers part of his face to hide his face from his congregation because of how guilty he feels.
When Goodman Brown finally meets with the devil, he declares that the reason he is late is because Faith kept me back awhile (Hawthorne 1237). This statement has a double meaning because his wife physically prevents him from being on time for his meeting with the devil, the wrongdoing that causes Goodman Browns whole sense of guilt. When Goodman Brown comes back to the town, he projects his guilt onto those around him. His pride...
rises within him to cast a shadow over the apparent realities of life in Salem that he once took as visible evidence of sanctity (Martin 84). Goodman Brown feels he can push his own faults onto others and look down at them rather than look at himself and resolve his own faults with himself. The rest of his life is destroyed because of his inability to face this truth and live with it. In The Ministers Black Veil, Hooper commits a sin and is ashamed by it so he covers his face to hide from the sin. He also does this to prove that no one is perfect and that everyone makes mistakes.
On critic states that Hooper is more closely related to those who withdrew actively as a result of a misguiding religious zeal (Newman 200). This may be the result of how Hooper allows himself to commit a sin that he is forever guilty of. These two men are alike in that both of their feelings of guilt arrives from a sin that neither is aware that they committed. This sin is an allegory of the veil; the veil that will forever cover Goodman Brown and Parson Hooper. Goodman Brown and Parson Hooper both show great examples of excessive pride in the way that they carry themselves and their sins.
When Goodman Brown is venturing into the woods to meet with the devil, he leaves his unquestionable faith in God with his wife. This is an example of the excessive pride because of this promise that he made to himself. There is a tremendous irony to this promise because when Goodman Brown came back at dawn, he can no longer look at his wife with the same faith. Goodman Browns invisible veil is now pulled over his eyes in a way in which he can not see that he too has sinned and that it is not just the townspeople and his wife who are sinning. In The Ministers Black Veil, Parson Hooper does not seem to illustrate that much pride, but other critics seem to disagree. As one critic states, Others have judged Hooper guilty of a different kind of sin: excessive pride (Newman 205).
His pride is illustrated through him never stating why he wore the veil. The black veil is just constructed as an allegory that would compare sin concocted by imagination with unrecognized sin of oneself. The veil is ironically placed over Hooper's face to make the people of the congregation realize that no one is perfect and that everyone sins. Hooper constantly refuses to remove the veil. His veil disrupts numerous occasions just by the aura that it lets off. For example, It caused children to flee when he approached because he would not remove the veil even for one moment (Martin 75).
Although Hooper's self-deceptive insistence on wearing the veil is an ironic dramatization of his own inability to see his sin of pride even as he seeks to reveal the hidden sins of others (Newman 205). This demonstrates how much pride in the veil Hooper held. One can conclude that he has so much pride in this veil because he wants to be a more powerful and forceful minister who also wants his congregation to realize that they were not the only ones that commit sins. Sin is an issue that every human being has to deal with at one time or another in his or her lifetime. Some people try to hide their sins, some try to push them aside, and some try to deal with their sins in a more conventional way.
The largest place for confessing sin in the world is the confessional booth at a church. People go to tell their sins and feel cleansed afterwards. But what happens when a man who hears confessions day after day sins himself. There is no confession booth for the man to go to. He must deal with his sin in his own way, a way that will leave him feeling cleansed. Mr.
Hooper, the minister in The Ministers Black Veil, and Goodman Brown, both are this type of man who if he commits a sin there is no one they can tell. Throughout Hawthorne's short stories, Young Goodman Brown and The Ministers Black Veil, the veil symbolizes numerous hidden secrets that Parson Hooper and Goodman Brown have been hiding. In Young Goodman Brown, a black mass of clouds comes in between Goodman Brown and the sky as if to block his prayer from heaven. This mass of clouds can also be interpreted as a veil that has come in between God and Goodman Brown. God is now isolating him from the good Christians by shutting him out of heaven. Lea Newman quotes that The veil is sometimes viewed as something that will shade him from the sunshine of eternity (205).
Newman also quotes that this invisible veil over Goodman hides his sin from God. God knowing all does not allow Goodman Brown to proceed into heaven. The sin that Goodman Brown commits is the sin of worshipping the devil, and because of him doing this, he becomes marked for life with a veil that marks him with a hidden sin. In The Ministers Black Veil, on the surface, the first sight of the veil not only confuses the congregation but scares them as well. To put it differently, This irony is compounded that Hooper's sin is a hidden one -- hidden not only from his fellows but also from himself (Stibitz 157). Without even the slightest bit of investigation into the issue, these people have brewed in their imaginations all sorts of theories as to what is so wrong with the minister.
The true allegory arises from these beliefs of the community but does not wholly manifest itself until the minister sees it from his point of view. Though he may contend that the veil personifies sorrows dark enough to be typified by the black veil, it is possible to infer that the veil is actually somewhat of an experiment by the minister. Terence Martin quotes that Mr. Hooper donned the black veil, the matter is not relevant to the narrative but, to know why he put it on would have to be a different story. For the focus of the tale is on the veil, not on the ministers motives (72). By donning the black veil, the minister realizes his fear that the people of his community are more obsessed with a sin which they believe is the reason he wears the veil.
The community is sure the minister is hiding from his own sins, more than he is from theirs. As a result of guilt, excessive pride, and hidden sins, one can assume that without acknowledging this sin, it will remain with a person forever. Through Hawthorne's use of the veil as an allegory of sin Goodman Brown and Parson Hooper have learned that by committing a sin meant they had to live with it for the rest of their lives. Goodman Brown was supposed to learn that everyone is human and should be treated with compassion. Instead he learned that everyone is a sinner and forever treats people with abhorrence.
Enlightenment can impart great wisdom but only those minds which are open to receiving it. In The Minister Black Veil and in Young Goodman Brown, ironically both of the mens behavior led them to lead a life in isolation and depression. Also their lives both ends sadly with neither one ever removing the veils that covered their sins. Bibliography: Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1983.
Newman, Lea Bertani Var. A Readers Guide to Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. , 1979. Stibitz, E.
Earle. Ironic Unity in Hawthorne's The Ministers Black Veil. Critical Essays on Hawthorne's Short Stories. Boston: G.
K. Hall & Co. , 1991. 157 - 63
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Research essay sample on The Ministers Black Veil Verses Goodman Brown
