Comparing Minister's Black Veil, And Song Of Solomon

It is said that human beings are flawed creatures, and this unfortunately means that their actions are often inclined to have unintended, tragic consequences that cause suffering. A desire to prevent this human suffering sometimes leads authors to produce works that depict the punishments for letting fatal flaws, such as greed, lust, or obsession, control one’s life in order to effectively warn of how flaws can cause suffering and misery. Some of these authors are Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Toni Morrison. Poe’s “The Raven,” Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and Morrison’s Song of Solomon illustrate characters whose obsessive tendencies create torment in their lives and the lives of their loved ones. These pieces of literature

show the tragic suffering that occurs from letting obsession, a flaw, rule one’s life. Through these works, the authors present human nature as obsessive.
Edgar Allan Poe describes the torment that occurs due to a human’s obsession with his lost love using his poem “The Raven.” Based on the reading, Poe presents human nature as obsessive. In the poem, an unnamed narrator tells of how he was visited by a mysterious talking raven one night. The raven proceeds to taunt and torture the narrator by playing upon the man’s obsession with his deceased love, Lenore. The raven’s taunting deeply affects the narrator, who begs for a rest from his grief over Lenore’s death. The man cries, “Respite – respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore; / Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” (82-83). Basically, the narrator is saying that he wishes to forget Lenore so that he would finally be free of his pain at losing her. The word “respite” evokes a sense of relief, a feeling which the narrator implies he would experience if he could forget Lenore. “Nepenthe” means “forgetfulness” and is an allusion to a drug in Greek mythology that would cause forgetfulness in the one who would drink it, removing the sorrow that the person would have felt from the memories. The narrator exclaims his desire to “quaff,” or drink deeply, from the “nepenthe,” indicating that the man feels a strong desperation to be free from his pain. The desperation is so great that he would be willing to drink a drug and lose his memories to escape from the suffering that his obsession with his wife has caused him. This proves Poe’s assertion that humans are naturally obsessive beings and that obsession leads to tragedy and suffering. A short story that supports this assertion is “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Hawthorne depicts the adversities that come to a man when people obsess over his behavior.

An analysis of the reading reveals that Hawthorne presents human nature as obsessive. The story tells of a respected Puritan minister, Mr. Hooper, who decides to wear a black veil over his face. He refuses to tell his congregants his reasons for wearing the veil, and he never removes the garment. His congregants and his fiancée, Elizabeth, become fixated upon the mask and what he might be hiding underneath it. The congregants proceed to alienate Mr. Hooper. Later, Elizabeth breaks off her engagement with the minister and leaves him after he denied her request to remove his black veil. As she is about to abandon him, he says, “It is but a mortal veil – it is not for eternity! Oh! You know not how lonely I am, and how frightened to be alone behind my black veil. Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity forever!” (22). In other words, Mr. Hooper entreats Elizabeth to stay with him and tells her how he is suffering from the alienation that his former congregants forced upon him. The words “lonely,” “frightened,” and “miserable” all work to convey the depression, fear, and anguish that he felt since his ex-congregants shunned him. The phrase “mortal veil” is a metaphor that compares the veil to a human, a being who is also known as a “mortal.” It implies that, like a human, the veil is impermanent, making it a minor object that doesn’t have much importance in “eternity,” a word that emphasizes the vastness of time. This shows that the congregants and Elizabeth caused Mr. Hooper to suffer by obsessing over an insignificant object, his black veil. Thus, Hawthorne supports his claim that human nature is obsessive and that obsession creates tragedy and suffering. A book that shares Hawthorne’s view on human nature is Song of Solomon by Toni

Morrison.