Minister's Black Veil

In a quiet Puritan New England village, the respected Reverend Mr. Hooper stuns his congregation one Sunday by appearing with a simple black veil draped over his face, hiding all but his mouth and chin.

He offers no explanation, wearing the veil through sermons, a funeral, a wedding and every public moment thereafter, refusing to remove it even for his betrothed, who pleads with him before finally leaving him over it.

The villagers, unsettled and frightened, speculate endlessly about what secret sin or sorrow the veil conceals, and gradually the once-beloved minister becomes a figure of dread and isolation, set apart from the community he serves. Yet the veil also lends his words a strange new power over the guilty and the grieving.

As the years pass and Hooper grows old, he clings to the veil to his deathbed, where his final words suggest its deeper meaning: that every human face hides secret sin from others and even from God.

A concise, allegorical parable of guilt, hypocrisy and the unknowable darkness within each soul, the tale is a cornerstone of American gothic and Dark Romantic literature, using a single unexplained symbol to probe the distances that separate people from one another.