same time one is impressed with the convenience of James's approach one is led to question its correctness. For unless a story is light and frivolous, one expects the critic who finds it difficult to interpret either to discover a meaning in it, or dispraise it finally as inferior art. James, however, does neither. He is far from defining the story's tone as frivolous, he professes himself unable to find a serious meaning in it, yet he does not dispraise it. Instead he attempts to remove the story from the realm of serious art by asserting it was inspired by the "moral picturesqueness" of "the secret that we are really not by any means so good as a well-regulated society requires us to appear." James seems to mean here that Hawthorne, in writing "Young Goodman Brown," was not interested in revealing a truth, but in achieving a poetic effect based on the paradoxical existence among men, of evil in the guise of good.

Whether or not James is right here would seem to depend on the degree of seriousness and conviction one finds in the story. If, after finishing it, one thinks of Young Goodman Brown only as a shadowy figment of the imagination, one is perhaps justified in regarding his story as a hypothetical or speculative tale. But if, like the present reader, one conceives of Brown as only a little less real than Hamlet or Othello and much more real than such characters as Hawthorne's Mrs. Bullfrog or Ethan Brand, if one shudders with Brown at the impalpable menace of the forest, and if, after finishing the story, one is drawn to dark speculation on Brown's soul state at death, one would seem obliged to take the story seriously, to try to pluck out the heart of its mystery.

Whether or not Young Goodman Brown is intended to represent all mankind would appear to depend upon whether or not the author has included in the story a representative sample of mankind, and if so, upon whether Young Goodman Brown is himself representative of that sample. If there were not a fair sample of mankind in the story, Brown would not of course be representative of all mankind, even though everyone else in the story might closely resemble him in essentials.

To put the matter specifically, if it be granted that Young Goodman Brown in the course of the story moves from a state of simple faith to an evil state, and if the story suggests—as Brown himself suspects—that the other characters of the story, as representatives of all mankind, have gone through a similar experience, it will appear that Young Goodman Brown, in the essential matters of the spirit, is representative of all mankind. But if, on the other hand, it be concluded that owing to the Devil's deluding him with false imaginings in the forest, or showing him a sample of mankind which is not truly representative, Young Goodman Brown's suspicions about the world are not justified, then it will follow that Brown himself is not representative of all mankind, but only of some vile, suspicious portion of it.

Among recent critics who conclude that "Young Goodman Brown" views all human nature skeptically, is Richard Fogle. He writes apropos of this tale: "Hawthorne wishes to propose, not flatly that man is primarily evil, but instead the gnawing doubt lest this should indeed be true" [Hawthorne's Usable Truth, 1949]. In Fogle's view, then, Brown would be representative of all mankind as well as of the other characters in the story.

[D. M. McKeithan, in "Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown': An Interpretation," in Modern Language Notes LXVII, No. 94, February 1952] presents a view of the story very different from Fogle's. He writes:

This is not the story of the disillusionment that comes to a person when he discovers that many supposedly religious and virtuous people are really sinful; it is, rather, a story of a man whose sin led him to consider all other people sinful. . . . He did not judge them accurately: he misjudged them.

In other words, Young Goodman Brown does not even come near to being a representative of all mankind. Like a mirror with wavy lines in it, he perversely reflects the world as the world is not. In this view, "Young Goodman Brown" is the story of a warped and twisted psyche atypical of mankind in general.

One may be drawn to a conclusion very like McKeithan's without accepting all the evidence he adduces to support it. One may agree, for example, that Faith retains her virtue in the story. Even Goodman Brown, suspicious as he is, has no proof to the contrary, as the narrator makes clear: "Whether Faith obeyed [Goodman Brown's plea to 'look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one'] he knew not." And the narrator's description of Faith the next morning, "bursting into such joy at sight of him [Brown] that she skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village," would certainly suggest that she had summoned the strength to heed her husband's plea. Joy such as Faith showed that morning would seem to be a more natural consequence of resisting temptation than yielding to it, especially with the stakes so high.

There may be some doubt in one's mind, though, whether Brown was as wrong in his judgments concerning the minister of Salem village, Deacon Gookin, and Goody Cloyse, as he was about Faith. For it appears from the story that all three, in contrast to Faith, were of Satan's party even before the forest meeting. Only Faith and Brown himself are referred to as "the converts." It is at this point that an important ambiguity arises, not of the both/and, but of the either/or variety. How do we know whether the figures Young Goodman Brown sees in the forest—the figures of the minister, the deacon, the other citizens of Salem village and of the state of Massachusetts, and Faith herself—are genuine witches, or merely specters of truly virtuous townspeople conjured up by the Devil? They cannot be both at the same time. The same sort of problem faced Hamlet when confronted by his father's ghost, but Brown, unlike Hamlet, simply ignores the problem, leaving it to haunt his interpreters.

In the absence of any final answer to this problem, I conclude that the witches Goodman Brown saw were genuine. Even Faith was a witch. . . . She had been tempted by Satan; then, yielding initially to temptation much as Brown himself had done, suffered herself to be conveyed to the Witches' Sabbath to conclude her pact. Faith's pink ribbon which Goodman Brown sees fluttering down in the forest is the confession of her initial yielding. But Faith's confession also serves as a means of grace. Openly signifying that she still delights in the beautiful things of this world, that she is still vain of her appearance, that the whiteness of her angelism is still mixed with the crimson of her passion for Young Goodman Brown, the pink ribbons keep Faith humble and honest, and thus contribute to her ultimate preservation from the Evil One. Even so, for the duration of her stay in the forest, Faith remains a "witch."

Why do I conclude that the other figures Goodman Brown saw in the forest were also "real" witches? Principally because none of them had ever made any public confession of sin, failure to do which is a dangerous sign in any human being. The proof that they had never admitted to human frailty was Brown's trauma on discovering their guilt. In public the minister "mediate[d] his sermon," Deacon Gookin prayed "holy words," and Goody Cloyse "catechiz[ed]." None of them showed any signs of frailty corresponding to the pink ribbons of Faith, those efficacious talismans that confess one is still earthbound even though one's aspiration is heavenward. Nor did any of them confess, as Faith confessed, to "being troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she's afeard of herself sometimes." The minister, Deacon Gookin, and Goody Cloyse were the "unco' guid, or the rigidly righteous" of Salem village, and as such were likely candidates for Satan's party.

In other terms, they were pharisees, and their pharisaism led them to hypocrisy. Obeying the letter of the law, they kept from others, and perhaps themselves as well, the sobering fact that, being human, they were unable to follow perfectly the spirit of the law. They fell far short of the ideal expressed elsewhere by Hawthorne: "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred" [The Scarlet Letter].

To summarize, then, although one might reject some of the evidence on which McKeithan's conclusions are based, one might accept at least part of his evidence and conclusion: namely that Faith retains her virtue finally, and that Brown is consequently wrong in continuing to view that part of humanity which Faith represents with suspicion. In this view, Brown, as McKeithan asserts, is not representative of all mankind, and consequently the story is not totally pessimistic.

In apologizing for Brown's misanthropic view of mankind, one might argue that it was an easy step from the observation that all but one at the Witches' Sabbath were corrupt, to the conclusion that all at the Witches' Sabbath, indeed all mankind, were corrupt. And it would be especially easy for Brown, after discovering that some he had regarded as at least as virtuous as Faith had made a pact with the Devil, to come to the conclusion that Faith also had fallen.

At the same time one understands why Brown came to these conclusions, one must recognize that there was no valid reason for his coming to them. As long as his wife Faith gave signs of being faithful, Brown should not have despaired. Even if Faith herself had yielded to the Devil (I speak of Faith now as his wife rather than as a personified abstraction), Brown should have cast his net more widely in Salem village and beyond it in his search for virtue. He should have reckoned with the possibility that somewhere in Salem village, or at least beyond its narrow confines, there might be men neither "famous for their especial sanctity" nor "given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes." For it is worth noting that all of those Brown observes at the Witches' Sabbath fall into one or the other of these categories. Brown should have considered the possibility that the man who confesses his virtue is mixed with vice may possess not only humility, but true virtue as well, insofar as virtue is a plant that grows on mortal ground.

Having concluded that Brown's misanthropic view of all mankind is unjustified, and consequently that Brown, in his own devotion to evil, is not representative of all mankind, one may ask what portion of mankind he does represent.

The answer, I think, is that he represents those weaker members of a puritanical society who are traumatized, arrested in their spiritual development, and finally destroyed by the discovery that their society is full of "whited sepulchres." Others in such a society, with more strength but less moral sensitivity than Brown, recognize the power of hypocrisy to give the appearance of virtue (the sine qua non of success), and capitalize on this discovery to rise to the highest positions of secular and religious authority. Then there are those few hardy souls, who, like Faith, with difficulty preserve their virtue by letting a tincture of their vice be displayed on their breastplate of righteousness.

Hawthorne stands in this story, then, as an analyst and critic of the society that demands so much of a man that he can achieve what is demanded only through hypocrisy, and that blinds itself so thoroughly to the power of sin in the lives of even its best men that it denies them the ritual and balm of public confession.

Other critics have noted Hawthorne's concern with the moral rigorism of Puritanism. Vladimir Astrov, for example, comparing Hawthorne with Dostoevski writes [in "Hawthorne and Dostoevski as Explorers of the Human Conscience," in NEQ XV, June 1942]:

. . . Hawthorne and Dostoevski . . . stressed the power of the irrational and the abysmal in soul and life. . . .

Puritan rigorists had always to protect their integrity and their peace with blinds of inflexible dogmas from the impact of reality. This was the ostrich way to remain "pure" and "consistent." The security thus achieved was, of course, an illusory one. . . .

The result was, inevitably, perpetual moral conflicts, remorse, feelings of sin and guilt.

Herbert Schneider, similarly emphasizing Hawthorne's concern with the blind, malevolent side of human nature, which no display of virtue can eradicate, writes [in The Puritan Mind, 1930]:

For him [Hawthorne] sin is an obvious and conspicuous fact, to deny which is foolish. Its consequences are inevitable and to seek escape from them is childish. The only relief from sin comes from public confession. Anything private or concealed works internally until it destroys the sinner's soul.

These words shed light on the soul state of the minister of Salem, Deacon Gookin, Goody Cloyse, and Goodman Brown, as well as on that of Hester Prynne, in connection with whom they were written.

And Arthur Miller, attempting in his preface to The Crucible [1953] to establish a connection, long since denied by G. L. Kittredge, between the outburst of witchcraft at Salem and Puritanism, has this to say:

The witch hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims. . . . These people had no ritual for the washing away of sins. It is another trait we inherited from them, and it has helped to discipline us as well as to breed hypocrisy among us.

Finally, Hawthorne himself has in another work ["Main Street," published in The Snow Image III, 1900] made his criticism of Puritanism explicit:

In truth, when the first novelty and stir of spirit had subsided,—when the new settlement [Salem] . . . had actually become a little town . . . its rigidity could not fail to cause distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was sinister to the intellect and sinister to the heart; especially when one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom and the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next; for these characteristics, as was inevitable, assumed the form both of hypocrisy and exaggeration, by being inherited from the example and precept of other human beings, and not from an original and spiritual source.

What better anatomy than this could be found of the kind of society that produced Young Goodman Brown?

In "Young Goodman Brown," then, Hawthorne, as well as "explaining" the Salem witch trials, is pleading that what survives of Puritan rigorism in society be sloughed off, and replaced by a striving for virtue starting from the confession of common human weakness. Such a society would be based upon the firm foundation of humility and honesty rather than upon the sinking sands of human pride and the hypocrisy that accompanies it. In such a society, the soul of even a Goodman Brown might prosper. "Young Goodman Brown" is not so much the story of Brown's view of society as it is the story of the impact of a certain type of society on a man such as Brown.