SOURCE: “Beyond the Veil: A Reading of Hawthorne's ‘The Minister's Black Veil,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter, 1980, pp. 15-20.

In the following essay, Barry turns critical attention to the roles of the secondary characters in “The Minister's Black Veil,” concluding that Hawthorne's judgment of their actions is as ambiguous and complex as it is of Mr. Hooper himself.

The deliberate ambiguity of style and symbol in Hawthorne's tales provides a rich mine for criticism, but it can beguile us into assuming there is only one lode to the mine. Critics of “The Minister's Black Veil” have tended to become so preoccupied with the resonance of the most immediate ambiguity—that of the veil itself—that other elements in the story, most notably the handling of the secondary characters, have been neglected.

Certainly the ambiguity of the veil is central; but it has by now been...