Compare And Contrast Young Goodman Brown And The Minister's Black Veil

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil” both deal heavily in the topics of secret sin and hypocrisy. In both stories what these men hide from their family and community ultimately lead to their sad and lonely demise. Hooper hides his face and sins behind a veil and Brown keeps his encounter with witches a secret. Even though both of these stories exhibit different characters, setting, and time frame; they both share the same general concepts, tone, and theme. The first theme whose presence is very apparent is that of secret sin. In “The Minister’s Black Veil” Hooper wears a veil to symbolize the figurative veil that people hide behind. Hooper never directly says what sin he has or has not committed,
but everyone who knows him assumes that he has done something bad. Hooper lived a life of trying to hide his sin from his congregation, and in doing so he not only hurt himself but the people who loved and knew him. His congregation began to question his life and sin, and the sin he carried ruined is life and followed him to his deathbed. In “Young Goodman Brown” secret sin comes about when Brown goes into the forest one night to give his soul to the devil. As he moves into the forest he sees respected people that he knows from his town who are also on their way to the secret meeting in the forest. The day after that he wakes up in his bed and when he goes to the town everybody he sees there are the same people he saw at the meeting and from then on thinks everybody is a witch and is hiding something. Brown's secret sin destroys his life and shatters his perception on everybody and everything he knows. After Brown’s encounter with the devil, everybody he knew seemed evil to him. He never really loves his wife again and is forever in anguish by the paranoia which plagues him. Brown never stops believing this and dies lonely and sad. Just like how Hooper clang to his veil and refused to take it off even during his last hours on earth.
The second theme whose presence is very apparent is that of hypocrisy. In “Young Goodman Brown” the hypocrisy is that Brown goes into the forest to give his soul to the devil and when he comes back from the forest he thinks everyone he knows is a witch or evil. He is condemning everyone he knows from his village for being a part of the same ritual he was a part of. Not only that, but hypocrisy can be found in that he saw, or thinks he saw, prominent members of the church participating in devil worship, the exact practice they should abstain from. In “The Minister’s Black Veil” Hooper shows hypocrisy by not following his own teachings. In religion ministers and clergymen in general are proposed to be sinless and pure people. When Hooper dawns his veil his congregation start thinking of ill of him. It does not help either that he never directly says why he is wearing the veil. His congregation is confused and shocked because they thought of him as a flawless figure because of his stature in the church. It is implied that he had to have committed some sin and then tried to hide it under a veil, but the specifics of what he did are never really discussed.