Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Edward Jayne (essay date 1979)

Edward Jayne (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: “Pray Tarry with Me Young Goodman Brown,” Literature and Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1979, pp. 100-13.

[In the following essay, Jayne presents a psychoanalytic reading of “Young Goodman Brown,” asserting that Brown exhibits classic symptoms of paranoia and homosexual tendencies.]

Hawthorne's almost transparent use of paranoia as an organizing principle has been generally overlooked even in psychoanalytic studies of his fiction. There have been many critical approaches to Hawthorne, but most if not all of them have provided an essentially “normal” response to his paranoid manipulation of experience. It almost seems as if his uncompromising delusional intensity has provoked a variety of normal defenses among those who are sufficiently tantalized to want to deal with it without coming to terms with its fullest implications. By doing so they both accept and deny whatever resonance this...

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