Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Barton Levi St. Armand (essay date 1973)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Barton Levi St. Armand (essay date 1973)

Barton Levi St. Armand (essay date 1973)

SOURCE: "Young Goodman Brown' as Historical Allegory," in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1973, edited by C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., Microcard Editions Books, 1973, pp. 183-97.

[In the essay below, St. Armand analyzes Hawthorne's short story as "an historical parable, pure and simple."]

In his 1964 Centenary essay, "On Hawthorne" [included in Beyond Culture, 1965], Lionel Trilling declared that:

. . . in the degree that he does not dominate us, Hawthorne cannot wholly gratify us, moderns that we are. He is an exquisite artist, yet he suggests to us the limitations of art, and thus points to the stubborn core of actuality that is not to be overcome, and seems to say that the transaction between it and us is after all an unmediated one. . . . He has no great tyrant-dream in which we can take refuge, he leaves us face to face with the ultimately unmodifiable world, of which...

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