Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - John B. Humma (essay date 1971)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - John B. Humma (essay date 1971)

John B. Humma (essay date 1971)

SOURCE: " 'Young Goodman Brown' and the Failure of Hawthorne's Ambiguity," in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 8, December, 1971, pp. 425-31.

[In this essay, Humma argues that the ambiguous ending of "Young Goodman Brown" reveals Hawthorne's artistic failure rather than his triumph.]

Most critics of "Young Goodman Brown" consider it one of Hawthorne's finest short stories. Richard H. Fogle, for instance, says [in Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, 1952] that in "Young Goodman Brown" Hawthorne has achieved that "reconciliation of opposites which Coleridge deemed the highest art." Daniel Hoffman [in Form and Fable in American Literature, 1965] ranks it as "one of Hawthorne's masterpieces." To Roy Male "Young Goodman Brown" is nothing less than "one of the world's great short stories" [Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, 1957]. In spite of such accolades (or perhaps because of them),...

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