Ministers Black Veil

Many comments have been made about the short story “The Ministers Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Certain parallels can be drawn from both William Bysshe Stein, and Richard Harter Fogle. Both men have argumentative points on either side, but William Bysshe Steins argument that the “parable of the black veil is the story of betrayal, of a man of God turned antichrist” is not typically believable. Stein says the story has been unnecessarily exaggerated in modern criticism, and that Hawthorne deliberately tries to sidetrack the impulse of the reader to seek an analogue to the action in the logical source-the New Testament. Richard Harter Fogle claims that Hawthorne’s characteristic fusion of simplicity on the surface with layers of complexity beneath is perhaps nowhere more fully in evidence than in this story. Fogle also describes The Ministers Black Veil as a brief, highly typical and thoroughly successful story about a man and his secret sin. The Ministers Black Veil is s...