Once it all seemed so simple: “Puritanism” was “the haunting fear that somewhere, someone may be happy.” Then, more professionally, a Harvard Scholar named Perry Miller began to convince us that Puritan theology was a rather sophisticated affair, and that the Puritan affect would not be that easy to represent. Still, the sensation persists: Hawthorne's Puritans are nowhere very cheerful; and, in Hawthorne's own century, a liberal minister charged, in what he called a “moral argument” against their Calvinism, that “gloom” was one almost certain outcome of that religious creed. Did Hawthorne perhaps think he was right?

In something like his master allegory of Puritans and Others, his Revelers overflow with Jollity and Mirth, their more aggressive competitors bespeak and predict only Gloom. It turns out that in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” Hawthorne is reproducing rather than inventing the allegory of this more-than-twice-told tale; but even when traced to its historical sources, it does little or nothing to undo the claim that, at or near the outset, “Gloom and Jollity” were contending for something or other. And gloom is of course the last word in what may be Hawthorne's signature story: poor Goodman Brown gets more than he was asking for, but who ever said playing with the devil was not an extreme sport? In any event he goes through life, even to his grave, a very unhappy man. In “The Minister's Black Veil,” a certain Parson Hooper seems to have got his gloom a little more innocently: unlike Goodman Brown, his awakened sense of sin begins with himself; and whether he was right or wrong to express his private insight in the obliqueness of a symbol, the fact is that he can no longer chat comfortably with his parishioners after divine service, he misses out on his Sunday lunches with the local squire, and he doesn't even get the girl. If sentiment is the only standard, he might just as well be that “Man of Adamant,” whose hysterical fear of praying with the unregenerate keeps him locked up inside himself.