Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Wayne Dickson (essay date 1971)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Wayne Dickson (essay date 1971)

Wayne Dickson (essay date 1971)

SOURCE: "Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'," in The Explicator, Vol. XXIX, No. 5, January, 1971, item 44.

[In the following, Dickson notes that Goodman Brown lacks charity, the greatest of the Christian virtues.]

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is the story of a youth's initiation into the knowledge of the universality of the evil in man's heart. The story is ambiguous on the question of whether this newfound knowledge is trustworthy or illusory, though it is perhaps significant that the only guarantor of the authenticity of Brown's experience is the Devil, himself the father of deception. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of Brown's psychology, the inherent truth of falsity of the knowledge is unimportant anyway. What matters is first that he accepts it as true, and second that, having done so, he becomes "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man. . . ."

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