Parodic Rethinking of the Gothic in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”

ABSTRACT Hawthorne’s Father Hooper is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature, and critics have long noted the futility of attempting to dig out his secret from the depths of the text, leaving readers in a space of semantic uncertainty. This poetics of uncertainty to a large extent arises from the combination of incompatible genre features in the structure of the story. Through analyzing the integration of diverse generic voices within the text, this article demonstrates how the writer undermines traditional generic patterns turning the story into a self-reflexive Gothic parody marked by such traits as the deautomatization of devices, ironic intertextuality, parodic Doppelgängers, and teasing absence of closure. The purpose here is to reveal the parodic mechanisms of generic revision and renewal, expanding our understanding of Hawthorne’s Gothicism. The article examines how different voices interact, parodically doubling each other, undermining Gothic horror from within, and revealing its textuality. Hawthorne’s story poses a further question about the role of parody as a genre-renewing and domesticating mechanism in American literature of the nineteenth century. “The Minister’s Black Veil” can be read as a poetic attempt to rework “twice-told” meanings and generic patterns in the space of creative parody.