Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne

Two Opinions Regarding Puritan Massachusetts

To speculate on how Cotton Mather might have reacted to "Young Goodman Brown" is to mark a wholesale transformation in the content of popular Anglo-American imagination from the late 17th to the mid-19th century. Out of the theocracy and theocratic mind-set of Massachusetts Bay Colony there eventually emerged the rumblings of political revolution, perhaps less in spite than because of what Becker calls "the vain and pathetic effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual commonwealths" (Becker 97). But it would be wrong to underestimate the impact of that effort. In 1692, when judicial murders from the Salem witchcraft trials peaked, Cotton Mather declared himself persuaded that by the "confessions" of those who had borne witness to witchcraft, "the Devil has made a dreadful Knot of Witches in the Country, and by the help of Witches has dreadfully increased. . . a more gross Diabolism, than ever the World saw before" (Mather; emphasis in original).

From the perspective of 2003, it is difficult to credit such an idea, until one is reminded of the fundamentalist zeal of Nazis or religious fanatics who blather about "great Satans" and howl for "death to" this and that. Naïve and preposterous such behavior may be, but theocratic mind-sets linked to power--whatever god informs the mind--have done a great deal of real damage to real people. Thus not only the passage of tim

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ory and his preoccupation with his soul's integrity combine to make him a bitter and gloomy man. The values of the culture are too strong for Young Goodman Brown's vulnerable personality; they destroy him. In the character of Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne concretizes preoccupation with inner life and conformity with the values of the theocracy by focusing on the reaction to a profane ritual. Central to that is Goodman Brown's pathetic vanity about the strength of his soul vis-à-vis the devil, which in one brief episode of terror exposes a spiritual weakness that deteriorates, over the long term, into corruption, mean-spiritedness, and estrangement--or as it were a permanent state of sin. Throughout the story, from beginning to end, Goodman Brown has the option of behaving and thinking in one way or another, repeatedly choosing to think in a way that, spiritually, is prideful while also lacking nuance. Repeatedly he fails the test of fusing spiritual sensibility with tolerance for the sensibility of fellow human beings. The whole matter is amplified by the fact that Goodman Brown actively seeks confrontation with the devil. Faith asks him not to leave home, but he is determined: "Of all nights in the year, this one night must I
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Approximate Word count = 1602
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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