Young Goodman Brown
"'Lo! There ye stand, my children,' said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad, with its
despairing awfulness, as if his once angelis nature could yet mourn for our miserable race.
"Depending on one another's hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now ye
are undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again,
my children, to the communion of your race!'"
The above quotation from Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown is of central importance in analyzing the attitudes and
ideas present throughout the story, though in a curious way. The quotation (and the story itself), on first reading,
seem superficially to portray ...
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with the points in between these states. The
story seems more about the journey through between two rigidly defined states than about good and evil. By
describing good and evil through heavy-handed metaphors and symbols, such as his wife's name and the satanic
communion he finds himself at in the forest, and then describing goodman Brown's inability to adapt his self-image to
the hypocrisy he finds, Hawthorne comments on the ultimate failure of such a rigidly proscribed formula for human
existence. At the same time that sin is described as a seething, pervasive hypocrisy, it is also seen as a mundane fact
of living; Hawthorne seems to forfeit ultimate clarity of message in order to concentrate more fully on the journey
itself.
Hawthorne's sense of irony and sarcasm is well illustrated in an episode like goodman Brown's loss of his wife, Faith.
Brown experiences several points in the forest where he wants to stop, yet he always continues, because he still has
Faith. When ...
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the perimeter of the issue he wants to address instead of opting for total clarity.
Hawthorne uses many other dichotomous pairings to illustrate his ideas. Dark vs. light, uncertainty vs. safety, nature
vs. human, and fantasy vs. reality are employed to reinforce the idea that good and evil have been set up as strict
categories into which no one, not even the religious figures of the community, fit neatly. Is Hawthorne preaching a
more pliable attitude toward human thinking? Is he describing the hypocrisy which undoubtedly exists in the world
and then letting goodman Brown be a truly pious individual through his inability to accept what he sees in the forest?
Or is he more ...
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"Young Goodman Brown." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 18 Dec. 2007. Web. 24 Apr. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Young-Goodman-Brown/76029>
"Young Goodman Brown." Essayworld.com. December 18, 2007. Accessed April 24, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Young-Goodman-Brown/76029.
"Young Goodman Brown." Essayworld.com. December 18, 2007. Accessed April 24, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Young-Goodman-Brown/76029.
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