“The Minister’s Black Veil” is a parable: a short story that seeks to teach a moral lesson, often through the use of metaphor, simile, and symbol. Parables are often found in religious texts such as the Bible, making it a fitting genre for a story that explores themes of piety, sin, guilt, and religious hypocrisy.
The moral of “The Minister’s Black Veil” is revealed at the story’s end, with Reverend Hooper’s dying words:
“Why do you tremble at me alone?” cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. “Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!”
The description of the people surrounding Reverend Hooper’s deathbed as a “circle of pale spectators” echoes his congregation being depicted as “pale-faced” at the start of the story. This repeated diction highlights the similarity between what Reverend Hooper said then and what he is saying now. Then, he gave a sermon on secret sin: “those mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them.” Now, with his dying breath, he is saying something similar, but his message has grown less optimistic. Rather than suggesting, as he did in the past, that one can and should aspire to shed all secrecy, revealing their true selves, sins and all, to others, themselves, and God, Reverend Hooper now seems to have little hope that others will ever be so open. The message of the story at this point seems to be that people all have secret sins and other mysteries that they hide from one another and even themselves—their own “black veils,” whatever they may be—and that, because of this, people are doomed to be isolated and kept from true intimacy and self-knowledge, at least while they’re alive.
However, this message is complicated in the story’s final paragraph: Reverend Hooper does not get the last word, suggesting that his intended moral isn’t the only one Hawthorne has to offer. The minister, refusing to take off his veil out of principle even as he lays dying (he feels the people around him haven’t properly learned their lesson yet), is buried with his face still covered. He refuses to accept the behavior of the people around him and dies in self-righteous anger. In the last paragraph of the story, after the minister’s death, readers are presented with a disturbing image of his overgrown grave, and the narrator muses in the final line: “but awful still is the thought that [his face] mouldered beneath the Black Veil!” This suggests another, more subtle message to the story: that Reverend Hooper’s self-righteousness isn’t meant to be admirable, but rather tragic. While the townspeople were wrong to ostracize him based on unfounded assumptions, Reverend Hooper is also at least partially responsible for his own isolation. By holding himself above the townspeople as a model of virtue, he drives them away—precisely the opposite effect from what he had hoped to achieve when he first put on the veil.
