Abstract
The aim of this paper is to subject to critical assessment Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” in the current pandemic context, when wearing a mask or covering one’s face can take on a series of new symbolic and metaphorical interpretations. It seems apposite to accentuate that being masked or veiled, in Hawthorne, is more than an attempt to camouflage one’s identity, as it also seeks to stand for the viral spread of sin, avarice and jealousy. Hawthorne’s rigid moral climate – engendered by Puritanism, the weight of its history, and the virulent urban environment he came to observe – has contaminated the individual and urban society and, in the same breath, began to imperil nature as well. In this specific relation, the paper will touch upon the themes of concealment and the importance of how an invisible contagion (the sinful nature of human beings, that is) endangers the “edifice of society” in Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”* (1837), where the atmosphere of decay both in the human body and the soul are a clearly detectable quality of the tale.