Immediately after Hooper wears the black veil, the people of Milford isolate him from their community. Children and their parents refuse to respond when he greets them, Squire Saunders “forgets” to invite him to dinner, and even his fiancée, Elizabeth, abandons him. These changes are especially painful for Hooper because, Hawthorne notes, he is a friendly, loving person. Before Elizabeth leaves him, he begs her to stay, knowing full well that he will be doomed to a lifetime of isolation without her. As Hawthorne writes of Hooper later in life, “All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world: it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart.”
While Hooper’s veil isolates him from Milford, it also symbolizes the isolation that all human beings experience. As he explains on his deathbed, he will remove the veil only “when the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator.” In Hooper’s view, all humans are isolated, in the sense that they are alone with their secret sins and their guilt. Ironically, Hooper’s decision to wear a veil may have been an attempt to bridge the gap between himself and his friends by acknowledging sin and attempting to work through it.
Even if humans live in a state of isolation because of their sinfulness, Hawthorne suggests that it is possible to overcome this isolation with love, virtue, and patience. Elizabeth breaks off her engagement to Hooper, but she continues to love him and even tends to him on his deathbed. And for Hooper, who believes in the afterlife, all isolation is temporary, since in Heaven virtuous souls are united with God and with each other. Yet the fact that Hooper tries to teach his lesson on isolation and the townspeople never understand what he is trying to tell them only further reinforces the essential isolation between all people.