Mr. Hopper, a man who was a minister in a village in a town of Milford, somewhere in England. He was usually the person who would always be leading citizens, looked up to by everyone, including civil authorities. Of course, everyone knew Mr. Hooper in town. Every Sunday the whole village went to church. This Sunday, when Mr. Hopper got out of his house, his appearance was totally different than usual. The sexton who was ringing the bell so people could know the minister was there.
He stopped ringing the bell when he saw the minister wearing a black veil, that covered almost his whole face except his mouth and his chin. Every single person was talking and murmuring about the minister because he was wearing the black veil. Everything was so mysterious. That morning, Mr. Hooper’s sermon was about a secret sin. This made people think more things about Mr. Hooper. The typical characteristics in American Romanticism in “The Minister’s Black Veil” are particularly to the ones that connect to Gothic literature. Some stories might not include the several elements that a Gothic literature have.
For example, these are some Romanticism characteristics that “The Minister’s Black Veil” has, there are the inevitability of fate, the failure of human nature, the limitations of humanity, mystery and suspense, nostalgia and inner conflict, “But there was something, either in the sentiment of the discourse itself, or in the imagination of the auditors, which made it greatly the most powerful effort that they had ever heard from their pastor’s lips . . . . A subtle power was breathed into his words. ” (Freedman 360).
Sadness and the disconnect between man and his nature. the fictive equivalent of the minister’s sermon. Its subject to “had reference to secret sin”; it too is “tinged rather more darkly than usual with the gentle gloom” of its author’s temperament; and it, too, Hawthorne may well have felt, was his most powerful effort to that time. ” (Freedman 358). The disconnection of the minister with the whole village was huge, just because he was wearing a black veil covering his face. His character is more likely to be a romantic character in the story of his actions and confusion to everyone. Mr. Hooper was a romantic character.
Being romantic doesn’t mean or it does not describe love. He was a man with a character who was always concentrated on what he liked to do or what he was suppose to do. His imagination, for example. He started wearing the black veil, from one day to another, he didn’t want to talk to, no one about the veil, he showed everyone that he was embarrassed or scared to show his face because maybe he did something wrong or bad. He is expressing himself in actions and not in words, he is trying to show everyone that not all the people that walk around place to place like if they haven’t done anything.
Mr. Hooper does not feel good showing his face after what he has done or what the other person have done, we don’t know. In other terms of other romantic American literary characteristics, most of them concentrate on feelings, imagination, nature, and innocence. In this story, we can presence the concentrate of feelings and the innocence of Mr. Hooper. By the time he is wearing the veil I can imagine how he was feeling by having the black veil on. The innocence in why and how he is doing it. Why he will never tell no one what was happening to change his appearance that way. Mr.
Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish. As years wore on, shedding their snows above his sable veil, he acquired a name throughout the New England churches, and they called him, Father Hooper(Textbook pg 346). The black veil that Mr. Hopper uses that Sunday morning to cover his face symbolizes a crime or a sin. What Mr. Hopper did or what makes him sad or mad is the because he is wearing it.
By wearing the black veil, he does not care what people say or think. We all have a secret sin under us. I think that the people that were in the church didn’t feel comfortable looking at him and seeing his black veil on. It made them remember all what they have done in the past. What they wish had never happened. The Minister’s Black Veil” is less a parable of hidden guilt than an exercise in the complex employment of the artistic symbol, and, ultimately, a tale about the nature of such symbols.
The principal effect of the veil is “to avert explicit statements of what it stands for. Creating meaning and simultaneously hiding it, inviting speculation and resisting it, the veil not only “conceals] what is behind it, but is a sign of that concealment. ” It is, in short, a “symbol of symbols (Carnochan 185-87). The Minister’s Black veil story, it is a Parable. The story has a message where we can learn from. The parable that “The Minister’s Black Veil” is trying to show us or teach us that we all can have something that can be worrying us or wanting to forget about.
“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 it 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! ” (textbook pg 348).
Sometimes we don’t comprehend that other person want to keep their own problems to their own without sharing with anyone and that can be a new thing to learn about. Mr. Hooper didn’t want to take out the Veil for any reason. People wanted to ask him why he was wearing the veil. The only person who had the courage to ask him was Elizabeth the woman who was soon to be his wife. Mr. Hooper didn’t even think of letting her know what was going on with him. Even though, she told him that if he kept up wearing that veil she was not going to get married with him, he didn’t say a word to her. After a while, wearing the black veil.
He died in his bed. The only thing that he wanted after dying was to respect his body and to not take the veil off of his face. He wanted to carry the secret sin to his tomb with him. After he’s dead, everyone comprehended that when that person wants to keep to itself, that needs to be done, no matter what. The things that sometimes will appear interesting to others are going to cause more trouble and more drama,w but that is not the case. God will always know what to do with that other people. The correct thing to do is to look at yourself first in order to judge somebody else, needs to be done that way.
