Hawthorne's writing, although polished and genteel, nevertheless approaches the reader in a particularly unsettling manner, as when he states in “The Custom-House” that “the reader may smile, but must not doubt,” or allows, in “Young Goodman Brown,” the reader to determine Brown's night only a dream, “if you will.” Although Hawthorne's approaches to the reader have most often been discussed as invitations to the reader to participate in the making of meaning, I argue that Hawthorne's engagement hinges, instead, on emblem-making. Somewhat as in Neal, for Hawthorne this entails obscuring what is being represented (marginalizing rather than problematizing meaning) in order to raise questions about how the voice of a narrator solicits a certain affective experience. Experience is, furthermore, proposed out of the text's offer of conflicting vectors: reading along with the text, and taking images and ideas out and away from it. That figurative idea of a difference between moving along with and moving out and away from the text is the abstract, rather than personal, affect of Hawthorne.

The way emotion in Hawthorne emerges around the creation of emblems instead of around persons is particularly notable in “The Minister's Black Veil,” a story that first appeared in the 1836 issue of The Token. The story concerns Parson Hooper, who wears a black veil over his face, to the dismay of those who know him. The story begins with, and dwells upon, the effect of the veil upon his congregation: