“The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832)

This story by Nathaniel Hawthorne is more of a literary affair than horror, as the Wikipedia article I looked up can attest. “Hawthorne writes the story in an allegorical format, using a didactic tone,” etc. I should note the subtitle, “A Parable,” but it’s not an easy parable (or allegory) to understand. I think that’s what I like about it. One day the New England town Puritan minister shows up wearing a veil, two pieces of semitranslucent black cloth “[s]wathed about his forehead and hanging down over his face.” That’s it, basically, the whole story. He wears the veil for the rest of his life and never explains. Not even his fiancée can get a word out of him about it, and she’s the only person who can approach him. She breaks off the engagement. There are certain tantalizing clues. On the day he first appears wearing it, he conducts a funeral for a “young lady” in town. We don’t learn very much about her either. The minister is 30 when he begins wearing the veil, and he gets the usual threescore and 10 or so. It does seem profoundly symbolic, practically obliterating his face for others and occluding his own vision as well. Hawthorne notes more than once how it moves like curtains with his breath. The minister’s stoic absurd stubbornness is reminiscent of the scrivener Bartleby’s perverse refusal to work, in the story by Herman Melville, never explaining himself beyond that wonderful “I prefer not to.” Here the minister responds to queries much the same, though they are more simple demurrals. The story says he gets better at his job over the years, but that could also be just growing into it. So I guess I like this story the way I like “Bartleby.” There’s something powerful about the secrets these timid men keep—why they do what they do. What’s asked of them is not greatly inconveniencing in either case, the responses more like exasperating little character traits, which grow into more. I take the death of the young woman as significant, some kind of warmup for, or variation on, The Scarlet Letter. In that light, the black veil is cowardly in a way reminiscent of our old friend Arthur Dimmesdale but at the same time more forthright, if cryptic, in declaring his status as a sinner, if that’s what he’s doing. Of course, there may not be enough about the young woman to build even that much out of it. You could sit in a hundred classroom discussions or reading groups and probably still never get to the bottom of it. If horror is a grasp of the empty abyss, then maybe this is horror.

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