공감의 상호성-나다니일 호손의 「목사의 검은 베일」

Sympathy and Reciprocity in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil"

"The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's most widely acclaimed tales, and it is also regarded as the most enigmatic one. The story opens with a popular young minister's appearance before his congregation with black veil covering his face in an 18th-century New England puritan village. The following narrative examines the social and personal consequences of his decision to stay permanently veiled. While some critics focus on its resistance to reduction into one definite meaning in the text and debate over the ambiguity of the veil, others follow the characters' understanding of the veil as a symbol of hidden sin or guilt, and pay more attention to the effect of the veil in the context of the relationship between the minister and his parishioners. The veil paradoxically embodies both concealment and revelation as wearing a veil is an act of concealment while the veil itself signals the fact that the wearer has something to hide. Covering his eyes with the veil also highlights the fact that those around Hooper are exposed to the hidden gaze behind the veil, which renders them more vulnerable in the disadvantaged position. As the spiritual leader of the gaze of all-knowing God, and the veil is understood as the symbol of hidden guilt, which is introduced by Hooper's sermon with its condemnation of secret sin. This can be Hooper's appeal to the sensitivity to the moral judgement from the transcendental existence or knowledge. However, Hawthorne shows the limits of Hooper' way of dealing with the sense of guilt with its isolating and terrifying effects. Hooper is guilty of pridefully exalting one idea, though a valid truth in itself, to the state of an absolute. With his stubborn insistence on wearing the veil until the judgement day, he separates himself from the world and his community, building an emotional and communicational barrier between them. His veil deprives himself and his parishioners of the communal efforts for redemption through moral self-reflection and confession. Hawthorne accepts human inability to fathom the mystery of redemption and our limits in having full knowledge of the reality. His concern is in making moral judgments and acting morally within an unknowable and undecidable reality. While Hooper turns the mystery and uncertainty into an absolute, Hawthorne suggests the acts of reciprocity in sympathy as a way for moving toward a new possibility. The act of confession becomes meaningful as a performance of atonement and taking responsibility for our limits and sins in the communal relationship. The ethical movement of accepting alterity is possible by going into the reciprocal relationship within the self and with others as Adam Smith observes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.