40 Fun Facts About The Minister's Black Veil

Which question does The Minister's Black Veil leave unanswered right to the end?

Why Hooper wears it is never revealed: he offers only hints, telling his fiancée the veil may stand for sorrow or for guilt that any mortal might hide. Readers have argued over the reason ever since.

In The Minister's Black Veil, what becomes of Hooper's face covering when he dies?

It is buried with him: still veiled, he is laid in his coffin and carried to the grave. The narrator calls it an awful thought that his face mouldered beneath the cloth.

In his dying speech in The Minister's Black Veil, Hooper declares that he sees a black veil on whom?

Everyone around him, he insists, hides an inmost heart from loved ones and from God, so all wear a veil of their own. The watchers shrink from one another as he falls back on his pillow.

Who is Hooper's fiancée in The Minister's Black Veil, the woman who asks him plainly to remove it?

Elizabeth asks him plainly to lift the veil and explain it; when he will not raise it even once, she says farewell and the engagement ends.

A footnote to The Minister's Black Veil says a real Maine clergyman hid his face after what?

Accidentally killing a friend in his youth, the footnote says, led Joseph Moody to hide his face until his own death. Hawthorne adds that Moody's covering meant something different from Hooper's.

Which 1850 novel by the author of The Minister's Black Veil centers on a clergyman concealing his guilt?

The Scarlet Letter has Arthur Dimmesdale hide his part in Hester Prynne's adultery while she wears her shame openly. It followed the tale of the veiled Hooper by fourteen years.

Which consonant did the author of The Minister's Black Veil add to his name, reputedly to disown a witch-trial judge?

A "w" turned Hathorne into Hawthorne, probably in his early twenties. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne had been one of the judges at the witch trials.

In The Minister's Black Veil, how do village children react when the veiled Hooper nears their games?

They run away, breaking off their merriest sports while he is still far off. It grieves the kindly Hooper deeply, since he used to bless each of them after services.

What is the subject of Hooper's first sermon from behind the veil in The Minister's Black Veil?

Secret sin, the sad mysteries people hide even from those closest to them, is his theme. Each listener feels the preacher has crept up and found out some hoarded wrong.

Which fellow American author's 1842 review called The Minister's Black Veil a masterly composition?

Edgar Allan Poe thought its one defect was that ordinary readers would miss the hint. He argued that the veil points to a crime involving the young lady whose funeral Hooper conducts.

In which New England village, named in the opening line, is The Minister's Black Veil set?

Milford's handsomest couple marry on the very night the veil first appears, and nearby Westbury supplies the young clergyman who rides in for the deathbed scene.

Which fabric, hanging in two folds from his forehead, forms Hooper's covering in The Minister's Black Veil?

Crape was the usual cloth of mourning, so the veil suits the funeral Hooper conducts that afternoon and chills the wedding he performs that night. One village lady notes any woman might wear such a thing on her bonnet.

In The Minister's Black Veil, which parts of Hooper's face remain in plain view beneath the covering?

His mouth and chin stay bare, so his breath visibly shakes the folds as he walks, reads and prays. Everything above is hidden, though he can still see out through the cloth.

Which church officer, tolling the bell as The Minister's Black Veil opens, is first to cry out at Hooper's face?

The sexton is watching Hooper's door, ready to stop the bell at the first glimpse of him, and blurts out his astonishment. He later says he cannot feel his good parson's face is really there.

Which parishioner in The Minister's Black Veil asks if the veiled figure is really the parson, then calls him mad?

Goodman Gray follows Hooper across the meeting-house threshold crying that the parson has gone mad. An old woman hobbling in mutters that Hooper has made himself something awful.

After the first veiled service in The Minister's Black Veil, what harmless cause do one or two parishioners suggest?

Weak eyes needing a shade is their guess: they say Hooper has strained his sight studying by the midnight lamp. They insist there is no mystery at all.

In The Minister's Black Veil, which regular courtesy does Old Squire Saunders neglect to offer the veiled Hooper?

A dinner invitation is what he omits, though Hooper had blessed the food at his table nearly every week since settling in the parish. The narrator slyly blames a lapse of memory.

At the funeral in The Minister's Black Veil, what is the corpse said to do as Hooper bends over the coffin?

It shudders slightly, rustling the shroud, at the instant the veil hangs forward and bares his features. Only one superstitious old woman claims to have seen it.

In The Minister's Black Veil, two mourners in the funeral procession fancy Hooper is walking beside whom?

The dead maiden's spirit, walking at his side, is what both say they pictured at the same moment. Some readers take that shared fancy as a hint that Hooper and the young woman had a guilty history.

At the wedding in The Minister's Black Veil, what does Hooper spill on glimpsing himself in a looking-glass?

Wine, still untasted, hits the carpet as the sight of his own veiled figure horrifies him as much as it does the guests. He rushes out into the night, having just toasted the newlyweds.

As Hooper flees a wedding into the night in The Minister's Black Veil, what else does the narrator say is veiled?

The Earth, the narrator says, has on her own black veil as he rushes out. It ends the veil's first day, which took in a sermon, a funeral and a wedding.

In The Minister's Black Veil, a village boy panics his playmates and himself by covering his face with what?

A handkerchief, old and black, is his mask, and the joke scares him so badly he nearly loses his wits. By the next day the veil is all the village talks about, tavernkeeper and schoolchildren included.

What does the church deputation sent to question Hooper end up doing in The Minister's Black Veil?

The deputation leaves without asking a thing: its members sit speechless under his unseen gaze, then report the matter too weighty for anything short of a council of the churches.

Begging his fiancée to stay with him in The Minister's Black Veil, Hooper admits to feeling what behind it?

Lonely and frightened, he says, yet he still will not raise the veil a single time for her. He reflects, even in grief, that a mere piece of cloth has parted them.

Among its bad influences, what one desirable effect does the narrator of The Minister's Black Veil credit to it?

It wins him converts: the veil gives Hooper an awful power over souls in agony, and they say he led them out from behind it. Strangers travel long distances just to stare at him in church.

After Hooper's election sermon in The Minister's Black Veil, that year's laws are said to show what two qualities?

Gloom and piety worthy of the earliest settlers marked that year's lawmaking, so deep an impression did the veiled preacher make on the governor, council and representatives.

By what title do the New England churches come to address the aged Hooper in The Minister's Black Veil?

Father Hooper is the name he earns across the region as the years whiten the hair above his veil. By then he has outlived nearly all who were adults when he arrived.

In The Minister's Black Veil, which sober-minded villager tells his wife something is amiss with Hooper's intellects?

The physician admits the veil unsettles even him, making Hooper seem ghost-like from head to foot. Decades later a doctor is also at the deathbed, able only to ease the patient's last pangs.

In what role does Hooper's former fiancée reappear at his deathbed in The Minister's Black Veil?

His nurse, it turns out, is the woman whose quiet affection has lasted in solitude through all the years since they parted. She would have covered his face herself had the veil slipped.

In The Minister's Black Veil, which young clergyman from Westbury tries to lift the covering from the dying Hooper?

Reverend Mr. Clark, a zealous young divine who rode in haste to pray at the bedside, asks to cast the veil aside so no shadow rests on Hooper's memory. Rebuffed, he asks what horrible crime Hooper is carrying to judgment.

When a clergyman reaches for the covering in The Minister's Black Veil, how does the dying Hooper respond?

Hooper pins it down with both hands, snatching them from under the bedclothes with a sudden energy that stuns the watchers. He cries that it will never come off in this life.

Which expression, noted again and again in The Minister's Black Veil, does Hooper still wear as a corpse?

A faint smile, sad and glimmering, appears each time he is challenged: at the parsonage door, with his fiancée, before the church deputies and at last in his coffin.

Which two-word subtitle did Hawthorne print beneath the title of The Minister's Black Veil?

A Parable is the subtitle, casting the tale as a short lesson rather than a mystery to be solved. Hooper himself calls the veil a type and a symbol when pressed to explain it.

Which Boston gift-book annual, edited by Samuel Goodrich, first printed The Minister's Black Veil?

The Token ran the tale unsigned in its volume for 1836, crediting only the author of an earlier sketch. It first appeared under Hawthorne's own name when he collected it in book form in 1837.

Which 1837 Hawthorne collection, titled after a line in Shakespeare's King John, includes The Minister's Black Veil?

Twice-Told Tales borrowed the play's remark that life is as tedious as a tale told a second time, a nod to the stories' earlier lives in magazines and annuals. An old classmate put up $250 against the risk of printing it.

The Minister's Black Veil and its author are classed in which movement that countered Transcendentalist optimism?

Dark Romanticism dwelt on guilt, self-destruction and the limits of reform where the Transcendentalists saw human perfectibility. Hawthorne joined their Brook Farm commune in 1841 mainly to save money, not out of belief.

The congregation in The Minister's Black Veil belongs to which religious community?

Puritans settled the New England of the tale, and Hawthorne returned to their world again and again in his fiction, from Young Goodman Brown to The Maypole of Merry Mount.

The author of The Minister's Black Veil attended which college, where the poet Longfellow was his classmate?

Bowdoin graduated him in 1825, and he later called himself an idle student who preferred nursing his own fancies to digging at Greek roots. Longfellow went on to praise his first story collection as a work of genius.

For which fellow student and future president did the author of The Minister's Black Veil write a campaign biography?

Franklin Pierce met Hawthorne at a stage stop on the way to college and won the 1852 election his biography was written for. He was traveling with Hawthorne when the author died in 1864.

In The Minister's Black Veil, Hooper preaches an election sermon during which real colonial governor's administration?

Jonathan Belcher governed Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire from 1730 to 1741, which dates the middle of Hooper's long ministry to roughly a century before Hawthorne wrote.