Truth and Death in Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil Sarah Margaret Fuller’s American Literature explores the fledgling identity of the United States of America at a time when the national identity, not to mention the American literary canon, was in its nascent stage. Fuller depicts a particular quality that a quintessentially American literary work must possess: truth. “Before we can have poets”, Fuller writes, truth “needs to penetrate beneath the springs of action, to stir and remake the soil as by the action of fire…This is the one great means by which alone progress can be essentially furthered. Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance, without becoming original, for there is in every creature a fountain of life which, if not choked back by stones and other dead rubbish, will create a fresh atmosphere, and bring to life fresh beauty. And it is the same with the nation as with the individual man” (Lauter 1843). What does Fuller mean by this statement? And what does it have to do with literature? In a time when a national literature is under construction, Fuller asserts, “the only safe position is to lead” (Lauter 1844). A staunch commitment to truth, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil, becomes the undoing of its protagonist, Father Hooper. Yet, adherence to truth, at all costs, in Fuller’s reckoning, is what makes The Minister’s Black Veil a genuine work of American Literature. Critical thought, both historical and contemporary, plumbs Hooper’s motivation for donning the veil in the first place. The emphasis seems to be on uncovering the secret. While the consensus appears to be that Father Hooper’s secret is sexual in nature, no one appears clear on the details of Hooper’s sexual transgression. Richard Fogle contends “Hawthorne holds out the suggestion that the veil is a penance for an actual and serious crime, while at the same time permitting no real grounds for it” (Fogle 36). Paul J. Emmett suggests that Hooper puts on the veil to become a woman. He writes, “we’re never told why Hooper seeks feminization, or even if feminization is part of his motivation…but to deal with Hooper’s motivations for wearing the veil, we must, of course, ask what he wants, and in Hawthorne’s tale, what the minister wants is insinuated the same way as what the minister’s done. Repetitions. With both the young lady and Elizabeth, it’s not exactly that Hooper wants to be female, it’s that he needs to be the lost woman. He needs to become, to incorporate, to take the place of the very woman whom he has separated himself from” (Emmett 104). Carl Ostrowski defends a somewhat radical thesis. He understands the veil to be a means of camouflaging the ravages of syphilis on Father Hooper’s face. Ostrowski maintains the “diagnosis of Hooper [that he has syphilis] takes on added meaning in light of the problematic relationship between the minister and the young woman whose funeral he presides over, significantly, on the day he first wears the veil” (Ostrowski 203). Ostrowski goes on to point to the old woman who witnesses Hooper, and “who is immediately discredited by the narrator as a “superstitious old woman” (which only calls