garb brought nothing but gloom and, “Such was its immediate effect on the guests that a cloud seemed to have rolled duskily from beneath the black crape, and dimmed the light of the candles” (Hawthorne, The Minister’s Black Veil 106). The veil seemed to become a blockade of love and sympathy to the extent that he almost lost his true love, Elizabeth. In the years without Elizabeth, until late in his life, Reverend Hooper was close with no one. He was only a strange object of mystery and a show for strangers to travel many miles to see; no longer was he a familiar person, an accepted leader, and a friend to the community. Reverend Hooper lived the rest of his life in isolation, left hidden by a trivial choice that others could not accept. Puritan society set strict guidelines in the written law and in unspoken social standards of intolerance, but society itself was a hypocrite in how it sometimes followed the revered words of God, and other times not. Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter was a perfect example of the cause of society’s hypocrisy and of a hypocrite himself. Dimmesdale lived a life in two separate worlds. He was an inexperienced yet highly respected minister in Boston, an example of holiness; and he held dark secrets of sinful adultery within the shadows of his quarters. Dimmesdale hypocritically spent his days preaching of being “born again” through confession and grace, and his nights punishing himself for not telling the public the truth of his sinfulness. He repeatedly attempted to tell the truth, but could never bring himself to clearly admit his sin. When Dimmesdale preached of his unworthiness and deceitfulness to the crowds, it was in an indirect way that, “The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which the vague confession would be viewed” (99). The entire town respected Dimmesdale so much that when de...
