Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - E. Arthur Robinson (essay date 1963)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - E. Arthur Robinson (essay date 1963)

E. Arthur Robinson (essay date 1963)

SOURCE: "The Vision of Goodman Brown: A Source and Interpretation," in American Literature, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, May, 1963, pp. 218-25.

[In the following essay, Robinson posits that it is Goodman Brown's marital experience that has opened his eyes to the existence of evil]

Students of "Young Goodman Brown" agree in general that its main materials are drawn from Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World, published the year following the Salem witchcraft trials, in which Mather describes the devil's appearing as a "small black man" to lure people to forest rendezvous where church sacraments were imitated and mocked. Hawthorne, indeed, virtually quotes Mather in placing Martha Carrier among the witches as a "rampant hag" and promised "queen of hell." I have found, however, no comment upon Hawthorne's possible use of a passage from Mather's Magnolia Christi Americana (1702) as a...

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