Examples Of Alienation In The Minister's Black Veil

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Rural citizens of a village can easily spread fresh knowledge to surrounding neighbors quite quickly. This could be about someone else’s appearance, behavior, or personal business. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Hawthorne creates Reverend Hooper’s black veil as a barrier of alienation between him and society, the community’s perspective of the veil, and the overall meaning of the veil throughout his life and the parable.
Reverend Hooper became alienated towards the society due to the wearing of the veil. As days go on, people didn’t change their actions when it came to being reminded of the black veil the minister wore. “Indeed, it does isolate him: ‘Thus, from beneath the black veil, there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him’” (page 6). The veil was a borderline between light and dark; What he saw and could have was what he saw through the cloth but instead, the cloth gave sorrow and negative in expectations from the villagers. Based on Nancy Bunge’s observations, Elizabeth, Hooper’s fiancee, threatens to leave him if he does not dethrone the veil. Because Hooper has that unbreakable bond with it, he refuses to remove it. “Love is there for Hooper, but the veil prevents him from seeing or enjoying it” (Bunge, par. …show more content…
‘He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face… ‘How strange,’ said a lady, ‘that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper’s face!’... The black veil, though it covers only our pastor’s face, throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghostlike from head to foot. Do you no feel it so?’... ‘Truly do I,’ replied the lady; ‘and I would not be alone with him for the world. I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself”” (page
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