Although
"Young Goodman Brown" is usually discussed as an allegory in which a
young man is initiated into the nature of evil, such an approach often slights
two important problems. First, there is
the problem of the relationship between realism and allegory in the story. On the one hand, it seems as though it is
predestined that Goodman Brown enter the forest; on the other hand, he
questions the journey and acts as if he could struggle against it. In the first instance, Goodman Brown is an
allegorical character who has no free will to act in any way other than what
the allegorical nature of the story determines for him.
In the second case, the story makes use of the
realistic convention that the character is an as-if-real character with a mind
of his own. Because there is no way to
separate these two seemingly incompatible character qualities in the story, it
may be that "Young Goodman Brown" marks a point in the history of the
development of short fiction in which fabulistic conventions are beginning to
be displaced by realistic ones.
The
second problem the story raises has to do with the nature of evil, and the
related concepts of guilt and sin, for the story never makes it quite what sin
or evil is. We are certainly not
expected to believe that all the people in the village are in league with the
devil, that is, totally evil, as that metaphor implies. Instead, sin in this story must have a more
basic, more generalized, meaning. The
fact that Brown only has to make this journey once and that he has not made it
before suggests that it is a ritualistic journey that all human beings have to
make at a certain point in their lives.
If
we are to take "Young Goodman Brown" as a story about the discovery
of evil on its most basic level, then it might be well to compare it to that
archetypal story of the discovery of evil in the book of Genesis in the
Bible. Erich Fromm, in his study The
Art of Loving, makes helpful suggestions about how to understand the Garden
of Eden story. The first effect of Adam and
Eve's eating of the forbidden fruit is that they look at each other and are
ashamed. Fromm says we are not to
understand this as the birth of sexual prudery, but rather that the shame has a
deeper meaning. The eating of the apple
marks the separation of one entity into two separate entities, who must
henceforth be condemned to loneliness and isolation. This is the nature of sin that Goodman Brown
must discover.
According
to the Christian religion, of which Goodman Brown is a member, the only way to heal
this separation is to follow the words of Jesus to love the neighbor as the
self. However, as Fromm reminds us, this
does not suggest a narrow egotism, but rather that we love the neighbor until
we can make no distinction between the neighbor and the self.
Before
his journey into the forest, Goodman Brown simply assumed the sense of union,
as children do. However, the journey
into the forest is a metaphor for his discovery that separation is the nature
of humanity. Having made this discovery,
human beings have only two choices:
either they can accept the truth of separation and try to love the other
as a means to heal it, or else they fall into complete despair and
hopelessness. In "Young Goodman
Brown," the wife Faith is able to make the leap of faith of the former;
Goodman Brown, however, cannot; thus he goes to his grave an emblem of
isolation and despair.
Tomorrow: Hawthorne's "Wakefield"
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