The Minister's Black Vail as Art

Art Is Art Is Hawthorne

When an author (artist) can make his emotions, thoughts, ambitions, and inner self materialize, he has reached the dearest form of art, and the artwork can never mean as much to anyone as it does the one who created it. The artist does not own nor can he interpret completely due to the ever growing life-like attributes that the art/literature has adopted. Therefore, Hawthorne himself could not put into words an interpretation of The Minister’s Black Vail because the story its self is an interpretation of something living inside the author, a feeling that can only be felt. In this literary figuration, portrait, there is not a moral. Nathanial Hawthorn used the whole story to create or incite a particular emotion, a type of “picture” that is like something else. In the minister’s black veil Hawthorne creates a partial “portrait” of his own emotions and soul with the focus being on the pain that isolation, alienation, and loneliness brings to some one such as an artist.

An argument can be made in a few different ways, but it is best to determine the possible validity of the argument by attempting to view the piece in its entirety, considering all facetted parts of the story. The intended idea was created in the story, the story was created by the man, and the man was created by society, these are all contributors to The Minister’s Black Veil, possibly as much as the words. To consider the text, The Minister’s Black Veil, without taking into account, the above stated, is to see the piece incompletely. One must consider the entirety of the story, unless one believes: “A story is a story, is a story.”

As a precursor, the common understanding needs to be reached that: literature is an art, and has many mediums. Medium is the material or technique with which an artist works (Dictionary.com), for example: photographs, pastels, canvas, paper, ink, etc... There are technical, recreational, and otherwise artistic uses for all mediums. A small child taking pictures of a puppy with a disposable camera, a reporter taking precise pictures of a sporting event, and an artist taking close-up pictures of the dew as it drips off a tree are all different uses of the same medium in photography. Literature can be created with many different intentions and reasons, but the attempt to determine that something is not art based off of the motivation or intentions of the artist is quit meaningless. Some argue that each literary work constitutes itself and its relation to reality through a master metaphor that is co-extensive with its own body (Allen 1). One can find a good common ground for understanding without being quite as brood and definitive. It would be safer to stay on the idea, for now for sure, of fictional literature being art. This is what The Minister’s Black Veil is, art. One thing art is, is the representation of something else. The art itself does not represent its self, but something inside the artist. The Minister’s Black Veil is abstract in that it is indirectly representing something within the author himself. What is inside the man that he would want the reader to see? What could the reader possibly experience and be able to relate to the author with, without even knowing it? Isolation and loneliness is what Nathanial Hawthorn wants a reader to feel when he reads The Minister’s Black Veil.

Two relevant components of hawthorns art are, “multiple authorship” and his expected audience. Hawthorne had to find a way to communicate his unconventional ideas to a very conventional society. Many of his sketches seem to teeter between the two objectives of open expression and strategic rhetoric. Thomas R. More, in his book a Thick and Darksome Veil, determines from looking at the media in which he published and their reception to his literature that there was