Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Patricia Ann Carlson (essay date 1977)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Patricia Ann Carlson (essay date 1977)

Patricia Ann Carlson (essay date 1977)

SOURCE: "Setting and Fictional Dynamics," in Hawthorne's Functional Settings: A Study of Artistic Method, Editions Rodopi, 1977, pp. 128-31.

[In the essay below, Carlson discusses how Hawthorne inverts the symbolic significance of the forest and village settings to initiate the breakdown of Goodman Brown's simplistic understanding of good and evil.]

The most obvious ambiguity in "Young Goodman Brown" (New England Magazine, April, 1835) falls under H.-J. Lang's third classification, . . . the ambiguity of external actions. Was Brown's experience in the forest real, or was it a dream? Certainly, a strong case for this ambiguity could be culled from the implications of the scenic elements, but this is not the ambiguity which I intend to discuss because, clearly, it makes little difference to the ultimate meaning which Hawthorne wished to express. To the reader who asks "[h]ad Goodman Brown fallen...

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