Young Goodman Brown

In his short story "Young Goodman Brown," Nathaniel Hawthorne creates an image of innocence compromised in the face of the evil of the world, an evil that is always hidden and that masquerades at times as the height of probity. The way the story is presented leaves a question open as to whether Young Goodman Brown's experience was real or a vision. Hawthorne in this story does what he often does in his fiction--he juxtaposes light and dark, good and evil, innocence and experience, and fashions a moral fable out of the interaction of opposites, doing so in a way that leaves issues unresolved and that hints at the moral struggle in the world without truly resolving it or issues it raises about human behavior. Hawthorne brought profound moral and psychological insight into his fiction as he explains the complexities of human motivation and action. Hawthorne was convinced that most American literature of his time was too imitative of British models, so he devoted himself to the creation of an authentic American voice. He saw the conventional novel, with its concern for verisimilitude, as incapable of capturing the moral and social climate of America. He wrote a different sort of work, romances in which the "real" and the "marvelous," the actual and the imaginary, could mingle more freely so that the author could render through allegory and symbolism what he saw as the heightened drama of life in America. "Young Goodman Brown" follows this course precisely.

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he cannot reconcile that good may still exist even though it may have its dark sides as well. James R. Mellow writes of Hawthorne's method: The reader is left to wonder whether it has been a dream or a reality. the ambiguity is central to the story; in Hawthorne, the actual deed or the mere imagination of it each has an effect. In the morning, Goodman Brown returns to Salem village a different person--"a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man" (Mellow 60). The comparison made with "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux" is instructive. In both, Hawthorne treats a theme of initiation, but with differing results. The young man of "Major Molineaux" is initiated into the complexities of life in a dreamlike evening in a strange city, and he achieves a difficult maturity as he does so. Young Goodman Brown in his story, on the other hand, "is unable to understand or accept the evil revealed to him in the forest of the soul, loses faith in the reality of the good, and lives the rest of his long life in gloomy alienation" (Waggoner 16). Waggoner also points out that critical reaction to these stories has differed and that perhaps that difference is a matter of how we perceive different treatments of the

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