The Alienation of “The Minister’s Black Veil” Each person in this world, despite their perfection and their appearance, has something that they regret, or shame that they can not get rid of. But very few people show it; most hide their shame and regrets inside of them, where no one can see it unless they were told. They hide how they feel with happy emotions and smiles. Reverend Hooper, however, chose a different way to represent his shame: by wearing a black veil to cover his face from the community in which he lived. Shocked by the sight of their minister wearing a veil to hide his face, the society instantly branded him as an outcast, isolating him from the community. 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 …show more content…
The community wants to alienate Hooper from them because of strangeness of his veil. As Reverend Hooper is dying, the old minister demands, “Dark old man! With what horrible crime upon your soul are you now passing to the judgement?” (Hawthorne 7). Even as Hooper is dying, the old minister holds no sympathy for him, and has only his own curiosity on his mind: what crime had the old man committed? In a literary critique written by N.S. Boone, he discusses Hooper’s reaction to the people’s asking to remove the veil. He wrote, “Nothing, not he pleas of the elders, nor the nudging of Elizabeth, nor his own loneliness can persuade Hooper to remove that piece of black crape that separates him so dramatically from society,” (Boone 6). His refusal to remove the veil angers several people in the short story. They care nothing about the dying man, but about the secret behind the black