Thursday, 29 September 2016

In "The Minister's Black Veil," what happens to Mr. Hooper when he sees himself in the mirror?

On the day that Mr.
Hooper begins to wear the black veil, he first delivers his sermon, and the topic is
"secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would
fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect
them."  Such a subject allows readers to begin to understand that the veil is a symbol of
this attempt to hide our true sinful natures; Mr. Hooper wears it as if to admit that he has
such a nature, as we all do. 

After the sermon, Mr. Hooper presides at a
funeral, where the solemnity and darkness of his veil seems appropriate, but the wedding he
officiates later on is affected in quite a different way.  Here, the bride is overcome by a
"deathlike paleness" when she sees her minister, and the groom's hand is
"tremulous" when he holds his beloved's.  When Mr. Hooper raises a glass to toast the
new couple, he "catch[es] a glimpse of his figure in the looking-glass, [and] the black
veil involved his own spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed all others."  Just as
Mr. Hooper's "hearers quaked" when he preached upon the subject of secret sin, the
minister himself seems now just as fearful of his own aspect.  Seeing his own reflection, he is
reminded of both his own secret sinfulness as well as the secret sinfulness of everyone around
him, and, given that (as the narrator said earlier) we all desire to conceal this sinfulness
from ourselves and everyone else, the visual reminder of his sinfulness -- in the form of the
black veil over his face -- alarms Mr. Hooper enough that he actually drops his wine glass and
rushes from the building. 

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