Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Paul J. Hurley (essay date 1966)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Paul J. Hurley (essay date 1966)

Paul J. Hurley (essay date 1966)

SOURCE: "Young Goodman Brown's 'Heart of Darkness'," in American Literature, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, January, 1966, pp. 410-19.

[In this essay, Hurley discusses Goodman Brown's forest encounter with the Devil as the product of his diseased mind. ]

The critical controversy which has centered on Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" seems to have reached an impasse. Critics have usually seen the story as an allegory embodying Hawthorne's suspicions about man's depravity. This interpretation implies that the Devil's words to Goodman Brown—"Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness."—echo Hawthorne's own attitude. R. H. Fogle, for instance, writes [in Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, 1952], "Goodman Brown, a simple and pious nature, is wrecked as a result of the disappearance of the fixed poles of his belief. His orderly cosmos dissolves into chaos as church and state, the...

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