Young Goodman Brown's "Heart of Darkness"

Abstract

rHE CRITICAL CONTROVERSY WHICH HAS CENTERED on Hawthorne's 11 Young seems to have reached an impasse. Critics have usually seen the story as an allegory embodying Hawthorne's suspicions about man's depravity.' This interpretation implies that the Devil's words to Brown-Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness.-echo Hawthorne's own attitude. R. H. Fogle, for instance, writes, Goodman Brown, a simple and pious nature, is wrecked as a result of the disappearance of the fixed poles of his belief. His orderly cosmos dissolves into chaos as church and state, the twin pillars of his society, are hinted to be rotten, with their foundations undermined.2 Hawthorne, Fogle says, does not wish to propose flatly that man is primarily evil; rather he has a gnawing fear that this might be true.3 And Harry Levin has unequivocally stated, pharisaical elders ... meeting in the benighted wilderness, are doing the devil's work while professing righteousness.4 On the other hand, F. 0. Matthiessen and W. B. Stein have resisted the majority consensus and suggested that it is Brown who purposely seeks for evil.5 Recently David Levin has attempted to void both points of view by insisting that Brown is misled by the Devil who conjures up apparitions to befuddle his innocent victim.6 The idea is comforting but not convincing. To take guilt away from human beings in order to place it on infernal powers is not a satisfactory explanation of the 'Among them: Q. D. Leavis, in Hawthorne as Poet, Sewanee Review, LIX, 179205 (April-June, 1951); Harry Levin, in The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958); and Roy Male, in Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Tex., I957). 2 Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman, Okla., 1952), p. 79. 31bid., p. i6. The Power of Blackness, p. 54. 6 Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expresision in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 283; and Stein, Hawthorne's Faust: A Study of the Devil Archetype (Gainesville, Fla., I953), pp. 6-7. Unfortunately, neither of these critics offered a sustained analysis of his reading. Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's 'Young Brown,' American Literature, XXXIV, 344-352 (Nov., I962).