Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - James C. Keil (essay date 1996)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - James C. Keil (essay date 1996)

James C. Keil (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: "Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown': Early Nineteenth-Century and Puritan Constructions of Gender," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. LXIX, No. 1, March, 1996, pp. 33-55.

[In this essay, Keil examines "Young Goodman Brown" in terms of nineteenth-century views concerning masculinity and femininity.]

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" traditionally has been read as an examination of crises of faith, morality, and/or psychosexuality. Early readings focused on questions of theology and conduct, but since the opening years of the 1950s, a second category of readings has emphasized the psychosexual elements. Roy Male, for example, argued [in Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, 1957] that "the dark night in the forest is essentially a sexual experience, though it is also much more," while Frederick Crews observed [in The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, 1966] that in his...

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