Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Leo B. Levy (essay date 1975)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Leo B. Levy (essay date 1975)

Leo B. Levy (essay date 1975)

SOURCE: "The Problem of Faith in 'Young Goodman Brown'," in JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. LXXIV, No. 3, July, 1975, pp. 375-87.

[In the following essay, Levy examines Faith as a character, an allegorical figure, and a symbol]

Few of Hawthorne's tales have elicited a wider range of interpretations than "Young Goodman Brown." The critics have been victimized by the notorious ambiguity of a tale composed of a mixture of allegory and the psychological analysis of consciousness. Many of them find the key to its meaning in a neurotic predisposition to evil; one goes so far as to compare Goodman Brown to Henry James's governess in The Turn of the Screw [Darrel Abel, in "Black Glove and Pink Ribbon: Hawthorne's Metonymic Symbols," in NEQ 42, 1969]. The psychological aspect is undeniably important, since we cannot be certain whether "Young Goodman Brown" is a dream-allegory that...

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