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 time accounts for Puritan New England's transition from a witchcraft-fearing city on a hill (in Winthrop's famous phrase) to a society of yeoman nation builders. What happened is that a world perceived solely in extremes of black and white admitted nuance--color and shades of gray.
Not Hawthorne's secularism per se but rather his self-aware appreciation of nuance separates him from Cotton Mather. If Cotton Mather had read "Young Goodman Brown," he would have...