SOURCE: "'The Minister's Black Veil': Shrouded in a Blackness, Ten Times Black," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XLVI, No. 3, September, 1973, pp. 454-63.

In the following essay, Morsberger interprets "The Minister's Black Veil" in the context of Hawthorne's and the Puritans' theology.

As a chronicler of New England colonial history, Hawthorne can be said to have created in considerable measure the legend of our Puritan past. Yet there are a good many dramatic episodes and individuals that he only touched on obliquely if at all: the Plymouth plantation, the trials and exile of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson (his biographical sketch of the latter consists merely of several frozen tableaux), the Pequot War, the actual trials at Salem for witchcraft, and the Great Awakening. Jonathan Edwards, in some ways the greatest Puritan of them all, never appears in any of Hawthorne's fiction, though the "Surprising Conversions," bizarre behavior...