A closer look at the short story "The Minister's Black Veil"

"The Minister's Black Veil" is in opposition to the transcendentalist movement, because the story or the main character of it wants to show the reader, that Men is evil and full of sins.

Transcendentalism is a movement of writers, who believe that Nature, God and Men are divine. That means that you can find Men as well as God in Nature. The purpose of this special kind of thinking is, to bring the society back and closer to the nature again.

Transcendentalist writers also want to show the good part of human being. They believe that there can't be an original sin, because God is "good" and because of that everyone has to be good in his or her inner world as well.

An example for a writer of the transcendentalist movement is Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a transcendentalist he believes that Men are divine. In his essay "Self-Reliance" he says that "we are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents." (Emerson, page 215) He wants to say that every person, who is self-reliant, has to be divine, because self-reliance means that you can trust yourself and in order to trust yourself you need intuition or an i

And by letting Hooper wearing a black veil, Hawthorne shows that Hooper is different. That doesn't mean that he is free from sins, but he is aware of his sinfulness. And this awareness of sin is what makes him different and separates him from the others.

So he comes to the conclusion that the only way to be a pastor with this knowledge is, if he starts being a living and warning example of his faith.

In opposition to transcendentalism is anti-transcendentalism.

That is very important to mention here, because God's word is exemplified through the pastor's role as a living example of faith. But this aspect is contradictory to Hooper, because he came to the conclusion that human beings are all full of sins and because of that far away from God. He also comes to the conclusion that he can do nothing to bring his parishioners into completely closeness to God, because they are too "worldly".

In "The Minister's Black Veil" Hawthorne tells the story about a town's pastor, who changed his appearance by wearing a black veil on one Sunday.

At the beginning of the story the pastor Mr. Hooper is described as "a gentlemanly person, of about thirty, who, though still bachelor, dressed with due clerical neatness, as if a careful wife had starched his band, and brushed the weekly dust from his Sunday's garb." (Nathaniel Hawthorne, page 256)

But on this particular Sunday he suddenly wears a black veil over his face,

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 969
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)