Parson Hooper's Power of Blackness: Sin and Self in “The Minister's Black Veil”

Abstract

Hawthorne's tale of the Reverend Mr. Hooper is, by all accounts, one of his most puzzling. And, almost as certainly, Hooper himself represents Hawthorne's most difficult “case” of Puritan conscience. The more famous problem of the motivation and moral intention of Goodman Brown appears, by comparison, easy—and even a little melodramatic.