Tankersley 1

Alyssa Tankersley

Professor Barnes

LIT.2220.201

10 December 2019

Attack on the Puritans?

critics have battled on whether or not this short story is an attack on the Puritan religion. Many

of these critics and authors believe that Goodman Brown has lost his faith, but there are some

that believe he has actually realized just what faith in God entails. In Young Goodman Brown,

there are many aspects that point to Puritanism as the direct cause of Goodman Brown's

demise, but there is also evidence that puts the blame directly on Goodman Brown himself. Is

Young Goodman Brown an attack on the Puritan religion?

Joan D. Winslow in her article, The Stranger Within: Two Stories by Oates and

Hawthorne gives an interesting insight into the sexual desires and what that has to do with sin.

She compares Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown with Joyce Carol Oates’ short

story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?. Winslow states the resemblance between

the two main characters Goodman Brown and Connie, in that they are both sexually driven and

have two very separate lives. Goodman Brown is portrayed as a man who is “split”. In his town

called Salem Village, he is a man of faith. He has a wife, he goes to church, and he prays. On the

flip side, he meets with the “devil” as some have interpreted, in the woods for an initiation of

evil. Brown is “three months married”, as Hawthorne put it. With this new marriage comes the

new sexual desires, as he and Faith have consumated the marriage. With this newfound sexual
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desire, he is becoming aware of the sins that may be committed in life, and he may be having

trouble with accepting this fact. Joan D. Winslow states in her article, “Brown’s new

participation in sex and his new awareness of his own sexual desire are moving him across the

threshold between innocence and knowledge, childhood and adulthood, but this is a

movement about which he feels guilty and fearful”. While walking through the woods with the

devil, Brown becomes aware of all of the hidden sin among the individuals that he trusted

involving these sexual tendencies, and he loses trust and respect for the people in his

community.

Bill Christophersen, writing about the critique of Barton Levi St. Armand, believes that

Young Goodman Brown is not so much a story about sexual infidelity, but that it is an allegory

of the “uncertain pilgrimage of the American consciousness”. In his literary criticism, “Young

Goodman Brown” As Historical Allegory: A Lexical Link”, Christophersen quotes St. Armand. He

states, “the infidelity violates not simply marriage vows but that covenant theology which has

forced the American mind to cleave to the very idea of “Faith” itself.” St. Armand uses events in

the short story that consist of the devil making Brown’s doubts about himself bigger until they

involve every person he’s ever known and had respect for and trust in to make his case. This

evidence, in the eyes of St. Armand, “spreads a blanket of doubt over Puritan (and, implicitly,

American) society”. In Hawthorne’s story, Brown states, “what a wretch am I, to leave her on

such an errand!”. In regards to Brown’s statement, Christophersen states that Goodman

Brown's “errand” into the wilderness resembles the Puritans’ “Errand into the Wilderness”,

which is a metaphor first brought up in Samuel Danforth’s election sermon of May 11, 1670.

Danforth used this sermon to remind the Puritan community that they are on a mission to
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establish Christianity in the New World, and that it must be pure. He argues that the colony has

lost their way, and have forgotten what they came to the New World to do. Christophersen

states that this is mirrored in Young Goodman Brown during the baptism that was conducted

towards the end of the short story.

John Neary also has an interesting take on Young Goodman Brown. In his article,

Shadows and Illuminations: Spiritual Journeys to the Dark Side in ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and

Eyes Wide Shut, he compares Young Goodman Brown with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Neary talks about how both of the protagonists leads a “naive” existence, essentially barely

breaking the surface of what actually goes on in life. These characters crack when they

encounter a shadowy being that is potentially themselves. Brown experiences a new reality

when he is exposed and taught of sin. In Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne wrote, “with

whom he felt a loathful brotherhood, by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart.” In

this moment, Brown was fueled with the newfound knowledge of temptation. He was

accepting sin, even though he felt a distrust for the people that he had recently found out had

been lying to him his entire life.

Karen Hollinger has written a rebuttal involving James L. Williamson’s Young Goodman

Brown: Hawthorne’s ‘Devil in Manuscript’. In her literary criticism, Young Goodman Brown:

Hawthorne’s ‘Devil in Manuscript’”: A Rebuttal, she identifies Williamson’s stance on the matter

of Goodman Brown. He identifies Hawthorne’s short story “as a “hell’fired” satire in which the

speaker in the course of his telling the story “shows himself to be of the devil’s party” and

expresses a “demonic delight” in narrating a satanic tale”. Hollinger, however, does not agree in

the slightest. She states that “a close analysis of the narrative perspective in Young Goodman
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Brown shows it’s speaker to maintain a substantial distance from all of the characters in the

story, and especially from those associated with the devil’s party”.
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Works Cited

Christophersen, Bill. “Young Goodman Brown” As Historical Allegory: A Lexical Link”. Studies in

Short Fiction, Spring86, Vol. 23 Issue 2, p202. 3p., ISSN 0039-3789

Danforth, Samuel. A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge,

Massachusetts, 1670.

http://greatawakeningdocumentary.com/items/show/9

Ghallager, Edward J. “The Concluding Paragraph of “Young Goodman Brown”. Studies in Short

Fiction, Winter75, Vol. 12 Issue 1, p29-30. 2p., ISSN 0039-3789

Hollinger, Karen. “Young Goodman Brown: Hawthorne’s ‘Devil in Manuscript: A Rebuttal”.

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall82, Vol. 19 Issue 4, p381. 4p., ISSN 0039-3780

Miller, Paul W. “Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”: Cynicism or Meliorism?”. Nineteenth-

Century Fiction. Vol. 14, No.3, Dec. 1959, pp.255-264., doi: 10.2307/3044245

Neary, John. “Shadows and Illuminations: Spiritual Journeys to the Dark Side in ‘Young

Goodman Brown’ and Eyes Wide Shut.” Religion and the Arts, vol. 10, no. 2, 2006, pp.

244–270., doi:10.1163/156852906777977824.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Puritanism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia

Britannica, Inc., 21 Sept. 2018, www.britannica.com/topic/Puritanism.

Winslow, Joan D. “The Stranger Within: Two Stories By Oates and Hawthorne”. Studies in Short

Fiction, Summer80, Vol. 17 Issue 3, p263. 6p., ISSN 0039-3789