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Comparing Poe And The Raven By Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Poe and Hawthorne were writers of a genre known as the American Goth. Their writings were characterized by Gothic literary devices pertaining to mystery and horror. Poe and Hawthorne had the ability to bring forth an atmosphere of horror and suspense through their preoccupation with gloom and death, but they had very different ways of presenting their stories.

THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
In this story, Hawthorne brings forth of his favorite themes; that humankind is afflicted universally by seven deadly sins: covetousness, pride, envy, lust, anger, sloth, and gluttony. The story reveals Hawthorne’s tears the masks off the faces of his characters, whereas in The Minister’s Black Veil, the face of one single character is …show more content…

The narrator asks the raven a series of distressing questions even when he knows that the response is already predetermined. The narrator of the poem illustrates how humans search for meaning even when their existence seems meaningless (Poe, Quinn, O’Neill, and Kauffer 21). The person knows that the speech by the raven has no meaning, but he still continues to ask questions that may give significance to the predetermined responses by the raven. A person would rather be lonely than face the pain of accepting that he lost his lover, Lenore. “The Raven” is a poem that seeks to question whether the supernatural provokes fear or later creates decisions pertaining to the …show more content…

In Hawthorne’s work, the minister is ostracized by his community since the members think that his action of wearing a veil throughout brings gloom to their lives. His fiancée, Elizabeth, leaves him and breaks off their companionship as she does not understand why he wears the veil, and more so, why he will not remove it. In Poe’s poem, the person is in a house by himself reading a lore that is forgotten by a dying fire in the hope that he may forget about the death of Lenore, his beloved. Both the minister and the narrator’s loneliness are somewhat self-inflicted (Hawthorne and McIntosh 34). The minister wears a veil and refuses to remove it. As a result, he is ostracized from his companions and friends, whereas the narrator in the poem refuses to accept the anguish of losing his loved one, which means he will never really move

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In Hawthorne’s short story, the minister walks out of the rectory one morning with a black veil covering his face. In this story, it is heavily debated what that black veil actually symbolizes. Could it be a symbol of sin and guilt, or is it rather a barrier between the minister and the rest of society? The story takes place in winter at Milford, Connecticut, where it focuses on Parson Hooper, the town’s minister.

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831 Words | 4 Pages

Hawthorne’s text was in more of a sorrowful tone. When the minister would preach, he never yelled. He was monotone. “The Black Veil” was also in third person omniscient, while “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was in second person. In “The Black Veil” the readers knew about more than one person’s feelings.

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108 Words | 1 Pages

The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable, by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a tale that may seem dark, but rings with a haunting amount of truth. The dominant symbol that Hawthorne uses in this short story is Minister Hooper’s black veil. In this essay, the veil will be recognized as a symbol for the barrier between an individual and those around them. This barrier works to create fear and distrust in the characters throughout the work and greatly influences their actions and behavior toward Hooper. The symbol of the veil also opens the readers’ eyes to the fact that there is a barrier between themselves and the world around them.

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692 Words | 3 Pages

The Minister’s Black Veil Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil is judged as one of the greatest examples of American short fiction. Like many of Hawthorne's stories, the story is created around symbols. These symbols tie together what Hawthorne is trying to say. The Minister’s Black Veil illustrates symbolism using the black veil, The Minister’s wife Elizabeth, and the mirror.

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853 Words | 4 Pages

In “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the main character Reverend Hooper’s alienation, both personal and community, brought on by the black veil to portray the society's moral values about expressing personal shame. From the beginning of the short story, Reverend Hooper

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1215 Words | 5 Pages

The story The Minister's Black Veil (a parable) by Nathaniel Hawthorne has dark deep sides which show the real sides of the characters. The meaning of the black veil means that it´s a secret of sin and how terrible human nature can be. This may represent that all people carry in their hearts , or it could be a representation of Mr.Hooper's sin. In conclusion, Mr.Hooper tries to represent who he really is by wearing the black veil although he was different before he started wearing it and once he started wearing this Mr.Hooper became someone else which was surprising to all the people in town. ¨A rumor of some unaccountable phenomenon had preceded Mr. Hooper into the meeting-house and set all the congregation astir.¨

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947 Words | 4 Pages

Nathanial Hawthorne wrote many novels and short stories that focused on themes of sin. Two of these works, “The Minister’s Black Veil” and The Scarlet Letter, both discuss this theme which is one of the many connections that the two works share. Through multiple pieces of evidence, these works demonstrate a focus on the fight beginning in “The Minister’s Black Veil” between servants of the Lord and the devil. In his story “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Nathanial Hawthorne uses knowing diction to depict strong religious tones that represent the way he uses his sin and the sins of others to leave a positive impact on his parishioners in a direct comparison with how Chillingsworth’s sins become a negative representation of sin in The Scarlet Letter.

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472 Words | 2 Pages

Through allegory and his intentional vocabulary in ‘the Minister’s Black Veil’, Nathaniel Hawthorne parallels the literal veiling of Minister Hooper’s face with his own withholding of details within the plot. Hawthorne is deliberate in his word choice throughout, keeping with the theme of concealing. By purposeful ambiguity, both the minister and Hawthorne are demonstrating a point to their congregation or reader. In a review of Hawthorne’s book “Twice-Told Tales” in Graham's Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe insinuates that Hooper’s “secret sin” and the cause of the veil is an affair he had with the young woman whose funeral is mentioned, being “a crime of dark dye”.

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1118 Words | 5 Pages

With this in place, Hawthorne unmasks how people are easily affected by visual stimuli, forgiving only to themselves, and pursue pointless discourse in order to condemn the superficiality of humans. In a society where information is spread quickly and public opinion forms on nearly everything, there is a peril that inadquately substantiated public consenus will be deemed as a “truth”. Because of this, in the status quo, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” acts as a warning of accepting uncorroborated rumours as the the genuine truth. The story ushers the readers to recognize their inherent sins, and to not seek refuge behind the black veil of another person; rather, they should confront their sins directly to improve their human

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489 Words | 2 Pages

In the short story The Minister’s Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mr. Hooper, the town parson, begins wearing a black veil that obscures his face. The town begins gossiping that he might be hiding a secret sin. Hawthorne uses Nathaniel Hawthorne was an outstanding writer who wrote very intricate and frightening stories. The inspiration for these dark and depressing tales came from his tragic childhood. When Hawthorne was four years old his father died.

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1022 Words | 5 Pages

Everyone has secrets they can hide in mortal life, but no secret is off-limits in the hereafter. In analyzing this idea, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” utilizes dramatic irony to reveal the inner hypocrisy within a congregation of Puritans. The story follows a small town minister’s surprising choice to arrive on the Sabbath dressed in a black veil. There is not a word of explanation, to the congregation's confusion and fear—leading them to believe their minister possesses some secret sin. As the story progresses, it is revealed that nobody in the town is as pure as they appear.

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128 Words | 1 Pages

In the Minister’s Black Veil, Nathaniel Hawthorne's purpose was to reveal how acknowledging one's sin leads to ostracization of an individual and uncovers they hypocritical nature of an individual. Indeed, once Mr. Hooper, a well known compassionate person, dons a black veil to symbolize his own sin, he becomes ostracized and heavily criticized by his fellow villagers despite the fact that their judgement is a sin of its own. Not once did the villagers attempt to uncover the symbolization of the veil, but instead speculated, gossiped, what possible crime Revered Hooper must have committed. Thus, Hooper’s decision to make his sin visible leads to the Parishioners to fear him, withdraw their companionship, and effectively ostracized him from

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838 Words | 4 Pages

A man by the name, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was a well known writer mostly known for writing The Scarlet Letter. In the book, The Minister’s Black Veil, written by Hawthorne, a minister covers his face with a black veil as he preaches to his town. He doesn't get treated very nicely by all of the townsfolk. In The Minister’s Veil three messages that can be found are, everyone wears a mask, people who are different can seem dangerous and what it is like staying true to your beliefs.

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337 Words | 2 Pages

This week discussion was very difficult for me to understand because I have never been taught how to really understand poems or literature. The short story I choose to discuss is “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Hawthorne). When I first started to read this prose piece of literature, I thought it was about a minister dealing with several funerals and a lot of sermons (Editors). After, reading the story several times, I started to see more of what I believe to be an approach to sin and how it affects people’s views in a small town. I believe the theme of this story is about sin and guilt and how the minister wore the black veil on his face as a symbol of hiding our sins and how people never really want to face them or see their own sins.

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1436 Words | 6 Pages

In the parable "The Minister 's Black Veil,” Nathaniel Hawthorne aims to expose the deceitful pretense that members of society base their lives on. Hawthorne discloses the way people hastily judge one another based on looks, appearances, and behavior. He unveils the hypocrisy of society and the way it alienates whoever defy the norms or risk to uncover the covert. He reveals the moral of his allegory in a very ambiguous way through Reverend Hooper belief that everyone has a secret sin that he keeps to himself hidden from others, but certainly not from God. He uses The Black Veil on Reverend Hooper’s face as an emblem to provide evidence to support the notion that all humans are sinners in disguise.

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