Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Reginald Cook (essay date 1970)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Reginald Cook (essay date 1970)

Reginald Cook (essay date 1970)

SOURCE: "The Forest of Goodman Brown's Night: A Reading of Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XLIII, No. 3, September, 1970, pp. 473-81.

[In the essay below, Cook provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hawthorne's short story, observing that Goodman Brown's compulsive pact with evil is caused by his masochistic desire to punish himself.]

"Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart . . . "

Hamlet v. 2, 220

I

In a literary epoch when the dominant field of action was the frontier settlement, the forest, and the fort, Hawthorne focussed on the world of moral imagination. His "Young Goodman Brown" is a paradigm of this particular world, and Brown's behavior on a fateful night in his life is the key to this haunting tale. Although the motives for Goodman Brown's behavior are...

[The entire page is 3627 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass