SOURCE: "Hawthorne's Psychology of Death: 'The Minister's Black Veil,'" in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. VIII, No. 4, Fall, 1971, pp. 553-60.

In the essay below, Benoit traces the existential philosophy in "The Minister's Black Veil," arguing that Hooper represents the freedom of accepting human finitude.

Straightforward analyses of Hawthorne are hard to come by for the simple reason that he was not straightforward; he was fully aware that the world of human affairs is indeed a round one. More often than otherwise, enigmas rather than answers—or enigmas that are answers—confront the reader of his fiction: the red letter on the black field at the end of The Scarlet Letter, the Pantheon in The Marble Faun, the man with the red and black face who startles Robin in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," or the minister's veil. It is no anachronism to say that he seems to set...