Free Will In The Minister's Black Veil

People make choices every single day. Some choices are as major as whether or not to end someone’s life, and some choices are as minor as choosing whether to make a right or left turn at an intersection. Despite the level of importance of one’s daily choices, it’s significant that people have the power of free will or individual choice. Mr. Hooper, the titural minister in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” makes a decision that drastically changes his life by one day choosing to wear an obscuring black veil day and night. Parson Hooper did not falter from his decision to “[change] himself into something awful...by hiding his face,” even when his fiancée Elizabeth broke off their engagement over this veil (Hawthorne 342). Mr. Hooper’s strong, unfaltering

Hooper, inside the story of “The Minister’s Black Veil”, has become such a figure in his town to when it came time for a young woman’s funeral, several suspected that there was some kind of supernatural play at hand. From how they suspected that Mr. Hooper could’ve easily been walking alongside, hand-in-hand, with her spirit to how a few swore they saw her corpse shake as he kissed the late woman’s forehead (343). This builds upon the aspect of the human mind known as paranoia, in a sense. When the human mind can find no explanation for a phenomena, the brain shifts to delusions which could ‘explain’, imaginatively and not scientifically, what had occurred. This is prominent throughout history and shown heavily in some literature, and it only makes sense that delusions and ‘supernatural’ effects took place within a story written in the Romantic era, when imagination and emotions over the mind were placed as a higher priority than reason. These supposed supernatural events were more than likely thought up and imagined by the townsfolk who ‘swore’ they saw such things exist, and thought they could imagine their minister and the