authority over the behavior and attitudes of others. As Van Doren puts it,
Yet there was much about it (Puritan society] that he (Hawthorne) disliked. It was dismal, it was confined; he would not have had it back. The Scarlet Letter in no sense recommends it as a system of thought or a way of life. Hawthorne did not need to believe in Puritanism in order to write a great novel about it. He had only to understand it, which for a man of his time was harder . . . If one were serious, one never forgot the eternal importance of every soul, and never doubted that the consequences of deeds, even of impulses, lasts forever. The Puritans had known this all too well, and their resulting behavior was at times abominable (137-8).
In "The Minister's Black Veil," such behavior takes the form of a fearful yet definitive mean-spiritedness and deliberate isolation that aggravates Mr. Hooper's deliberate isolation of himself from them. Once the village gets more or less used to seeing the veil, it holds itself as one away from him: "Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared: a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish" (301). The villagers take from Mr. Hooper, even go so far as to call him "Father Hooper," but they do not give anything to him. Society is all that they might provide him, but this is precisely what they cannot provide.
Becker's historiography of Massachusetts Bay is a straightforward analysis of the political, social, and moral conflicts informing the pattern of ideas in "The Minister's Black Veil." His description of the Puritan mind set or "covenant" of private and social life in Massachusetts Bay illustrates on a scholarly level what Hawthorne evokes on the emotional level and suggests the pull of priorities informing the characterization of the peculiar...