non Hawthorne's secularism per se precisely rather his self-aware appreciation of nuance separates him from Cotton Mather. If Cotton Mather had read "Young Goodman chocolate-brown," he would kick in confronted contingency and nuance as fundamental attributes of human psychology, all the same (or especially) in 17th-century Salem. He would engage done it by unveiling the consciousness of Goodman brown, who is not self-aware, still less prepared to recognise the possibility of physical or moral ambiguity. Just as the secure Puritan fathers fused temporal and spiritual, Goodman Brown conflates the perceive and real. It is not only that he trusts his senses too much but also that he imbues idiosyncratic sentient and psychological figure with universal moral significance. How and why that happens constitutes the action of Hawthorne's story.
"Young Goodman Brown" contains elements of fable with which Cotton Mather would have been familiar. The text cites Goodman Brown's "aptly named" (Hawthorne 1) wife Faith and the figure of the devil. But what provides texture and credibility to the allegory is the social environment of Puritanism. In that regard, Hawthorne alludes to the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, when William
Hawthorne by no means takes the view that witches roam the wood for opportunities to corrupt hard citizens, a view that Mather would have to interrogate after nurture "Young Goodman Brown." Nor is Hawthorne so simple as to disregard the erroneous as fundamental to human experience, which indeed is what "Young Goodman Brown" is about. But it is also about failing the test of sage capacity--first for deliberately conjuring what is unnatural, which is the irrational and supernatural, and second for literalizing the irrational as the reality of spiritual experience of God and the world. In some(prenominal) cases the oddball disowns his culpability and assumes the role of victim, though his agency in his psychological experience is his real demon. He literalizes his intake, never interrogating dream logic.
It is a final twist of irony that Goodman Brown embodies the diabolism that Cotton Mather describes, though not for the reasons old Cotton would have thought before reading the story.
Becker, Carl L. The Beginnings of the American People. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1915.
In the character of Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne concretizes preoccupation with inner life and conformity with the set of the theocracy by focusing on the reaction to a worldly ritual. Central to that is Goodman Brown's pathetic vanity about the strength of his consciousness vis-?-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.
And so he falls victim to evil--not because devil worshippers from among the good people of Salem try to induct him into their black sabbath, but because his credulous dream feeds the notion that he lives in a community comprising devil worshippers. He acquiesces in the image of the flaming stone altar around which the good people of Salem have gathered to celebrate a black mass. The bigger picture is that accustomed pr
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