Selina Smith English 3rd Secret Sorrow/Secret Pain Essay Feb. 2, 2024. Characters in stories often deal with some type of struggle that shapes their behavior. Secrets play a significant role in stories. As the story progresses, we usually see how these hidden truths impact the characters' lives. Specifically, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask,” the characters deal with secrets and how they affect them. Some secrets might not seem important, but others really mess with the characters' feelings. Take “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for example. The minister wears this mysterious black veil that hides not just his face, but also the pain and guilt he is carrying inside. …show more content…
Hooper’s face was behind that piece of crepe,” (2). This curiosity shows how people started gossiping and talking about the veil, making the minister feel even more alone. The veil does not just make the minister feel alone, it also makes him feel sad and guilty all by himself. When the minister talks to other people, it is clear he has a tough time making a connection with them. His fiancée, Elizabeth, cannot understand the importance of the veil. Because of that, it caused problems between them. On the other hand, the mask in Dunbar’s poem acts as a metaphor for the people who wear it to hide their true emotions. The speaker said, "We wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes." The speaker tells us how society forces them to wear a mask, concealing their identity and hiding behind a fake smile. The quote "With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, and mouth with myriad subtleties" (4), shows a clear picture of how much emotional pain the speaker is going through, showing that their feelings are really hurt. This tells us that the speaker feels lonely and always hides their feelings, like the minister in Hawthorne’s story. In conclusion, both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil" and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask”
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Minister’s Black Veil”, the reader is introduced to Parson Hooper, the reverend of a small Puritan village. One Sunday morning, Hooper arrived to mass with a black veil over his impassive face. The townspeople began to feel uneasy due to their minister’s unusual behavior. When Parson appeared, “Few could refrain from twisting their heads towards the door; many stood upright….” (Monteiro 2). Throughout the story Hooper does not take off the black veil and the townspeople, including Reverend Clark from a nearby village, treat him as if he were contagious disease. A veil typically is used to represent sorrow, but in this story it is used to represent hidden sins. No one exactly knows why he
The story “The Minister’s Black Veil” is symbolic of the hidden sins that we hide and separate ourselves from the ones we love most. In wearing the veil Hooper presents the isolation that everybody experiences when they are chained down by their own sins. He has realized that everybody symbolically can be found in the shadow of their own veil. By Hooper wearing this shroud across his face is only showing the dark side of people and the truth of human existence and nature.
The gothic characteristics that are found in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” delve into the dark side of the human mind where secret sin shrouds the main characters in self anguish and insanity. Both Poe and Hawthorne focus on how much of a burden hiding sins from people can be, and how the human mind grows weak and tired from carrying such a burden. Poe illustrates that with his perturbed character Roderick Usher who was rotting from the inside like his “mansion of gloom” (Poe 323). Hawthorne dives deep into the mind of one Mr. Hooper, a minister, a man admired by all, until he starts wearing a black veil to conceal his face because “ The subject had reference to secret sin” (Hawthorne 311) . An analysis of both Mr. Hooper and Roderick Usher show through their speech, actions, behaviors, and interaction with other humans, the daily strain of hiding sin from one another.
The poem, "We Wear the Mask”, by Paul Laurence Dunbar is about separating Blacks people from the masks they wear. When Blacks wear their masks they are not simply hiding from their oppressor they are also hiding from themselves. This type of deceit cannot be repaid with material things. This debt can only be repaid through repentance and self-realization. The second stanza of “We Wear the Mask” tells Blacks whites should not know about their troubles. It would only give them leverage over Blacks. Black peoples’ pain and insecurities ought to be kept amongst themselves. There is no need for anyone outside the black race to know what lies beneath their masks. The third stanza turns to a divine being. Blacks look to god because he made them and is the only one that can understand them. They must wear their mask proudly. The world should stay in the dark about who they are. This poem is about Blacks knowing their place and staying in it. This is the only way they could be safe.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" illustrates the dangers of secret sin. Allowing guilt from things done in the past, things that cannot be changed, can ruin lives. The life of the secret-carrier will be devastated, along with the lives of that person's most loved ones. Hawthorne uses various types of figurative language in his works to portray his message. "The Minister's Black Veil” is no exception; Hawthorne uses symbolism and suggestion to add depth and mystery.
Written in iambic tetrameter and in the plain English verse, the writer continually bombards the reader, through continuous repetition, the idea that the Negro hid his emotions behind "The Mask. " This is done to emphasize a sense of deception and belief that the average negro is a happy soul, rather than a "tortured [one]" (p 918,11) as Dunbar implies. The first stanza in itself is a lament of the "Negro's" conditions as perceived by the world. It is a representation of the past, in that the past is the speaker's past lament of the mask, not a past event in history/time. The first two lines of the poem, "We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-" (p 918,2) are incorporated to introduce the image White Americans see when visualizing the slave.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first black poets in his time to confront the hypocrisy he saw around him. “We wear the mask” was one of his outstanding works that addressed racial injustices in American society. This poem was all about the assertion that “we wear the masks” to hide their true feeling. Yet, he goes on to emphasize that the ruthlessness of suffering and pain that these masks try to cover up because they had to keep all the pains by themselves without expressing. According to William Carroll, “The poem closes with a repetition of a sentiment stated earlier: ‘But let the world dream otherwise, / we wear the mask!’ The people show a dogged determination to keep the true nature of their sufferings to themselves and to present to others an outward show of happiness and lack of care. Surely, such insistence on deception must be motivated by powerful feelings resulting from terrifying experiences. Such were the experiences of many people enslaved in the United States before the birth of this poet” (1-2). Because of their racial appearance and experience in injustice society, they have to hide their feeling.
There is no end to the ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”; this essay hopes to explore this problem within the tale.
“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson are two poems that depict how many people hide their feelings from others. The two poems are similar in theme, but are told from different points of view and differ in plot.
The Minister’s Black Veil, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1836, is a parable about a minister, Mr. Hooper, who constantly wears a mysterious black veil over his face. The people in the town of Milford, are perplexed by the minister’s veil and cannot figure out why he insists on wearing it all of the time. The veil tends to create a dark atmosphere where ever the minister goes, and the minister cannot even stand to look at his own reflection. In Nathaniel Hawthorne 's literary work, The Minister 's Black Veil, the ambiance of the veil, separation from happiness that it creates, and the permanency of the black veil symbolize sin in people’s lives.
In the short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the Mr. Hooper’s black veil and the words that can describe between him and the veil. Hawthorne demonstrates how a black veil can describe as many words. Through the story, Hawthorne introduces the reader to Mr. Hooper, a parson in Milford meeting-house and a gentlemanly person, who wears a black veil. Therefore, Mr. Hooper rejects from his finance and his people, because they ask him to move the veil, but he does not want to do it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Mr. Hooper’s black veil symbolizes sins, darkness, and secrecy in order to determine sins that he cannot tell to anyone, darkness around his face and neighbors, and secrecy about the black veil.
"The Minister's Black Veil" is an allegorical narrative in which the agents of setting, symbols, characters, and actions come in a coherent way to represent non-literal and metaphorical meanings about the human character. The black veil is without doubt the most important symbol used in the story. It comes to represent the darkness and duality of human nature, adding thereby a certain undeniable psychoanalytical angle to the short story. The black veil represents the sin that all men carry secretively within their heart as M...
Sarah Rojas Professor Waterbury ENGL1120 25 June 2024 Hidden Sins Sins should not be judged by people. Over the years, the Church has been teaching its community what is good, what is wrong, and the penitence of their actions. The Church made them believe they would get to the final judgment one day, where God will decide their destiny to be in heaven. Regardless of whether this is true or not, there is a problem. Clergy members see themselves in the obligation to feign perfection and judge other clergy members’ sins to fit with their community.
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” is a lyric poem in which the point of attraction, the mask, represents the oppression and sadness held by African Americans in the late 19th century, around the time of slavery. As the poem progresses, Dunbar reveals the façade of the mask, portrayed in the third stanza where the speaker states, “But let the dream otherwise” (13). The unreal character of the mask has played a significant role over the life of African Americans, whom pretend to put on a smile when they feel sad internally. This ocassion, according to Dunbar, is the “debt we pay to human guile," meaning that their sadness is related to them deceiving others. Unlike his other poems, with its prevalent use of black dialect, Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” acts as “an apologia (or justification) for the minstrel quality of some of his dialect poems” (Desmet, Hart and Miller 466). Through the utilization of iambic tetrameter, end rhyme, sound devices and figurative language, the speaker expresses the hidden pain and suffering African Americans possessed, as they were “tortured souls” behind their masks (10).
Paul Laurence Dunbar, dispatches the cold troubles of African Americans in the lyrical poem, "We Wear the Mask." In this poem, Dunbar links imagery, rhythm, rhyme, and word choice to in order to institute a connection to the reader. From reading the poem, one can infer that Mr. Dunbar is speaking in general, of the misery that many people keep concealed under a grin that they wear very well. But if one were to go further and take the time to research Mr. Dunbar’s selection of this piece and the era of which this poem was written, one would come to understand that this poem focuses entirely on Paul Laurence Dunbar’s viewpoints on racial prejudice and the struggle for equality for the African-American’s of his time period. Though this analysis is not based on the meaning of this poem, it is necessary that in order to demonstrate the sound of analysis, one must first understand the poem.