Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter and Father Hooper from “The Minister’s Black Veil” have a kind of inverse relationship. Dimmesdale is tormented with guilt for a sin which he is unable to confess. He is beloved by his parishioners and believed to be a paragon of piety. Father Hooper, who refuses to explain why he wears a black veil over his face, terrifies and alienates his parishioners by the veil’s symbolic suggestion of hidden sin.
