[In the following essay, Morris examines misnaming and misreading in “Young Goodman Brown” in a deconstructive critical approach to the tale.]

Two trends in recent criticism of “Young Goodman Brown” form the background to this essay. First, historicist critics, analyzing the story's Calvinist dilemmas, often remark upon the seeming inevitability of its action. Thus Michael Colacurcio concludes that “everything seems to follow from, or indeed to be contained in the initial situation of the story” (391). Jane Eberwein believes that the hero's “exploration of the hitherto concealed recesses of his soul would have come eventually as a test of his new birth” (26). For these and other critics, the story argues some necessity in Brown's confrontation with evil in the forest.¹ It is as if young Goodman Brown's fate was always, already inherent in his marriage to Faith. Second, among commentators who adopt newer critical approaches to the story, there is a growing consensus that its theme concerns reading. Thus James L. Williamson writes that “Brown's experience in the woods will come to represent the experience of art, of reading the tale ‘Young Goodman Brown’” (156). Williamson builds his thesis on Sheldon W. Liebman's argument that the reader is “made to be the central character of the story” (158). These interpretations continue a long-standing tradition of interest in the self-reflexive character both of this story and of Hawthorne's oeuvre.²

In this essay I want to extend the direction of these two trends by arguing that the necessity articulated in the story is the inevitability of misreading. In order to arrive at this de Manian sense of the tale, I will examine, first, the problems of character-names, especially as these relate to the narrator. Next I discuss how misnaming is related to the story's subversion of the distinction between proper and common nouns. These two sections raise the possibility of some necessity for the reader, following the narrator, following Brown, to recognize misinterpretations only belatedly, only after having suffered them. In the third section I analyze how the foregoing primary deconstruction of the figures of the tale is repeated in a secondary deconstruction, of the reader's experience in interpretation.³

I

In a general way, deconstruction—like “Young Goodman Brown” itself—seeks to illuminate unexamined assumptions in interpretation. Hence it will serve as an introduction both to the tale and to this essay's method to discuss certain critical presuppositions with regard to characters' names. Richard Hostetler correctly points to the hidden assumptions in the work of R. H. Fogle and others who accept without qualification the names, used in Brown's forest-journey, for which the narrator provides no verification (222). For example, many commentators call young Goodman Brown's fellow-traveller “the Devil” (or “the devil”—as we shall see, even conventions of capitalization are not unimportant in the tale), but the narrator never does.⁴ Several passages in the text may give rise to such an identification, among them the following interchange:

The traveller put forth his staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed the serpent's tail.

“The devil!” screamed the pious old lady.

“Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed the traveller, confronting her and leaning on his writhing stick.

“Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” cried the good dame. “Yea, truly it is, and in the very image of my old gossip Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is.”

(79)

But close inspection of this passage reveals that it affords no incontrovertible basis for identifying Brown's fellow-traveller as the Devil. On the contrary, the fellow-traveller responds to the old lady's startled expletive with a question, not a statement, after which she refers to him as “your worship.” (The interchange thus reveals a confusion of two functions of language, the semantic and the poetic, in Jakobson's terminology, an indeterminacy which as we shall later see can subvert other namings too.) The most that can be said of the passage is that a catechresis is expressed: the old lady believes that “it” is “your worship,” in the image of someone else. But even if we equated “your worship” with the Devil, we would still need to evaluate both the woman's belief and the fellow-traveller's acquiescence in it: by itself the catechresis cannot establish “true identity”; on the contrary, the trope blocks it.

Similarly, although on their journey Brown and his fellow-traveller use the name Goody Cloyse, the narrator never does so. The closest the narrator comes to concurrence with their sobriquets is in the account of Brown's astonished glance when he beheld “neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff” (80). Thus the narrator's “confirmation” of this character's name is expressed simultaneously with her disappearance, a paradox which suggests that critical usage of “Goody Cloyse” may unwittingly perpetuate an interpretation that the story itself does not ratify.

As many readers have noted, doubts may also be raised concerning Brown's attribution of identities to the two voices he hears in the forest.⁵ Even though he hears only a “voice like the deacon's” and “the solemn old tones of the minister” (81), Brown unquestioningly believes these represent the minister and Deacon Gookin. The fact that one voice uses a noun-of-direct-address in an apparent reply to the other does not resolve the doubt, if only because the story's use of similar-sounding, even identical names for various characters underlines the arbitrariness of signification in the tale: thus, Martha Cory and Martha Carrier are both witches; Goodman Brown is the name of both grandfather and grandson. Thus, young Goodman Brown's attribution of presence to the two voices he overhears must remain, even at this semantic level, only a hypothesis.

Yet the fact that Deacon Gookin, the minister, and Goody Cloyse are mentioned by the narrator later, at the forest-ceremony and in the village, raises the more complex issue of the unexamined assumptions in the use of all those other names that are cited by the narrator. For if the judgments of young Goodman Brown, Goody Cloyse, and the fellow-traveller are called into question for hastily attributing names to “figures” whom the narrator regards more neutrally, the narrator's judgments are correspondingly undermined.

James L. Williamson has shown that the diversity of the narrator's styles reflects those of the three putative devil-figures whom Brown encounters on his journey (the fellow-traveller, Goody Cloyse, and the ministerial leader of the forest ceremony): variously sarcastic, gossipy, and sermonic in tone, the speaker's styles implicate the fiction-maker in the morally equivocal, demonic world into which Brown is introduced (161). But other characteristics of the speaker also make his unreliability evident. First, the apparently baffling allusion to the Egyptian magi can be understood only in self-indicting ways: if the narrator “means” his own allusion, then he becomes a genuinely superstitious proponent of the view that Brown's fellow-traveller is more than six thousand years old. Note here that the narrator's claim goes beyond an arguably plausible, Calvinist assertion that the fellow-traveller might represent a contemporary avatar of some principle of evil permanent in history; instead, the narrator seems sufficiently convinced actually to insert this “diabolic” agent into the text of Exodus. But, if on the contrary, the allusion is merely frivolous or hyperbolic, then our faith in the narrator's judgment, allusiveness, and naming elsewhere in the story is shaken. (As we shall see, this essay's argument is that a necessary departure from faith in naming may be an important construal of Hawthorne's allegory.)

And there is a disconcerting dimension even to the content of the allusion: in Exodus, Yahweh tells Moses and Aaron that the rod which is thrown down to the ground and changes into a serpent will be the sign of their divine direction. However, the magis of the Pharoah are able to duplicate exactly the same sign, thereby at once calling into question the signifiying capacity of Yahweh's sign. For the writer of Exodus, it is only when the serpents of Moses and Aaron eat those of the magi that Divine guidance of the Israelites is “incontrovertibly” established.

To this deliberate subversion of narrative reliability should be added other contradictions. When young Goodman Brown is seized by a fit of demonic laughter, the speaker comments: “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man” (84). Again, the alternative interpretations of the passage call the narrator's judgments into question. If, as some argue, the narrator “means” simply to impart a cliche of folk-wisdom, then his own perspecuity in judgment elsewhere may be doubted. But if the narrator “means” what he says, then we must believe that he has in fact seen the “fiend in his own shape.” These alternatives for interpretation are equally destablizing: the narrator is thus either a hyperbolic fool or a superstitious fanatic.

Finally, the narrator's attitude toward the historical era that forms the backdrop to his story cannot be decided. Writing in retrospect from approximately the 1750s, the narrator understands the outcome of the witch trials. He alludes, apparently without irony, to Mather's judgment of Martha Carrier. When combined with his concluding, apparently approving references to “the sacred truths of our religion” (89), the reference would seem to establish the narrator as an orthodox Calvinist who evidently approves of church policy and history with regard to heresy. And yet, just as clearly, the history of criticism of the story shows that the tale itself calls such orthodoxy into question. Again the alternatives form a contradiction: the narrator's sincerity presupposes obtuseness to the point of opacity; but to impute cynicism to him would vitiate the story.

In fact, the story recounts a double misinterpretation: first, young Goodman Brown and other characters attribute names to figures in a process to which the reader, following the narrator, demurs. Yet when the narrator subsequently makes similarly definite attributions, and then interpretations, we are led to wonder if he commits the same errors as young Goodman Brown. That which at first establishes the credibility of the narrator—his refusal hastily to attribute presence to mere “figures”—serves by the end of the tale to subvert the authority of narration in general.

This paradox is an instance of what J. Hillis Miller, following de Man, calls “varnishing,” that is, an authorial gesture which asserts some putative presence or signified while simultaneously disclosing the untenability of such a center.⁶ “Young Goodman Brown” dramatizes a seeming necessity for such varnishing: the mistakes of the characters and the narrator are not simply ridiculed from some normative satiric perspective; on the contrary, critics agree that they seem inherent in the opening situation, in the marriage of young Goodman Brown to Faith. To understand how such misinterpretation could come to seem necessary, it will help to examine critical presuppositions with regard to Faith.

Just as most commentators hastily attribute the signification “devil” to the fellow-traveller, so the tradition is nearly universal that Faith means “faith in God.” However, it must be conceded that this traditional interpretation is itself an inference, an attribution of an absent signified to a signifier. While everything in the social and historical contexts of Hawthorne's tale makes such interpretation understandable, it is nevertheless an interpretation. Now some sense of the necessity for interpretation may begin to emerge here: we protest, rightly, that Faith must be faith in something, that faith must have a referent. And certainly “Young Goodman Brown” sustains such protests to the extent that it depicts a world in which interpretation is, indeed, unavoidable.

As a means of respecting the complexity of this dilemma, let us assume for a moment that Faith means not “faith in God” but “faith in a signified,” faith in some unequivocal relation between signifier and signified. Such an assumption does no immediate violence to the tale, since faith in significance would appear to be a precondition of any subsequent theological faith. With this (admittedly erroneous) attribution in mind, we might attempt to paraphrase Hawthorne's allegory in this way:

We are married to faith in a signified in the sense that discourse is impossible without the presupposition of some presence, some referent for the “figures” we encounter in life. Yet at the same time, doubt of the signified is inherent in the very nature of such faith. Therefore, once we “begin on the path” of our necessary misinterpretations, we arrive at a place which calls into question all previous names and identifications. It is at such a point that we see that the “object” of faith may itself be merely a signifier.

(Like all paraphrase, this one is clearly misleading since, as Derrida argues, it strategically serves as a supplement which privileges the ontological status of its “original,” the story.) Nevertheless, with such a context in mind, we can return to the story and examine its details from a different vantage point.

II

If all putative signifieds may be only signifiers in their turn, then the distinction between proper and common nouns may be undermined. As J. Hillis Miller has observed: “No name is ‘proper.’ All names, proper or common, are sobriquets, nicknames, figurative substitutes for proper names that can never be given and that cannot exist” (“Address” 289). “Young Goodman Brown” questions the distinction between proper and common nouns most obviously with regard to its titular hero. In what sense is “Goodman” a proper noun? The narrator also refers to him as “the goodman.” Of course, the hero's name, like Goody Cloyse, is an instance of the Puritan custom of converting moral attributives into proper names. But Hawthorne's usage has the effect of interrogating the basis of the distinction implied by Puritan tradition. Are these names substantives, attributives, or both? In fact, the very word “goodman” is a blend of both. Thus the uncertainty with regard to proper nouns leads to the even more fundamental one, between substantive and attributive. Such binary oppositions found Western logocentrism: thing and attribute, necessary and accidental, content and form. If “Goodman” may not be a “true name,” and may in fact blur the categories of noun and adjective, then what of “young”? The capitalization of the word in the title and in the story's first sentence momentarily seconds the doubt: as part of a title, the word takes on part of a quality of a noun; it partly names the thing, the story “Young Goodman Brown” (which, however, after all, consists of signifiers). And these doubts are redoubled by the name “Brown,” a most quotidian and common attributive redeployed here as a substantive.

That mere capitalization “distinguishes” proper and common nouns reinforces the arbitrariness of the logical and grammatical distinction, and Hawthorne plays with this doubt throughout the story. Thus, we read of “the minister and Deacon Gookin” (81); we reflect on the convention that like the word “young,” titles are capitalized “when they are integral parts of names”; yet the signified of “the minister” now becomes problematic: does the phrase refer to a particular person after all? This undecidable is later, symmetrically, repeated when Brown thinks he hears “a voice like the deacon's” (81). Of course, Hawthorne's capitalization is “consistent and correct”; nevertheless, its effect is to call into question the logical and grammatical distinction sustained only apparently and precariously by the convention.

The uncertainty created by the capitalization of the word “Young” in both the title and the story's first sentence is also repeated. At the forest ceremony we read of “Good old Deacon Gookin” but on Brown's return of “Old Deacon Gookin.” Again, Hawthorne's practice is correct: the convention for capitalizing sentence-beginnings has created the doubt. Nevertheless, the persistence of the awkwardness and its obvious correlation to the name of the titular hero call into question exactly how we know what “attributes” are “essential.” But even to frame the issue this way is to challenge the expectations of binarism and referentiality which readers must bring to the story, if only first to make semantic sense of it.

The most telling undecidable created by conventions of capitalization is evident in the last sentence Brown speaks. Back in his village, overhearing Deacon Gookin, Brown wonders: “What God doth the wizard pray to?” (89). Here the undecidability extends to that most important signifier in the story, that arche or origin of signification. The capital “G” in the word “God” would ostensibly presuppose Christian monotheism. And yet Brown's very question challenges monotheism by implying the existence of multiple gods. This doubt cannot be resolved; capitalization alone is inadequate to secure referentiality. And, even beyond this doubt, we must concede that such uncertainty is in fact created in language and sustained in writing. For it is the narrator who “writes” Brown's question. The narrator must make a choice—capitalization or lower case—but this act of interpretation only perpetuates a misunderstanding which would be always, already inherent in such a question even if spoken and overheard. Thus the narrator cannot escape the undecidability generated by the very necessity to articulate.

That troping is inherent in naming, misinterpretation in the very act of articulating, is apparent in Faith's first words to her husband:

“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear. …

(74)

There would be a kind of grim, Custom-House humor about this passage were it not for the fact that Faith's misdirected noun-of-direct-address is but one of so many which come to seem inevitable in the story: heart is no truer a name than “Goodman” is.

We’ve seen that the narrator's allusion to the magis' rods uncomfortably raised the prospect of a sign which might signify equally divine guidance or its absence. But other signs and their interpretations in the story are also equivocal to the point of undecidability. Two simple examples occur during the discussion of young Goodman Brown's ancestors. The hero protests:

“And shall I be the first of the name of Brown, that ever took this path, and kept—”

“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person, interpreting his pause.

(77)

Here the signifier is a pause, literally nothing. Hence, whatever the merit of the fellow-traveller's interpretation, it cannot be confirmed. The point is quickly reinforced by young Goodman Brown himself, as he reacts to the innuendos made against his ancestors:

“If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvel they never spoke of these matters; or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven them from New England.”

(77)

The silence of Brown's ancestors gives rise to two mutually exclusive interpretations of their characters, that they led lives of probity and that they didn’t. Like the magis' rods, the signifiers here (silences) generate not simply ambiguity, but undecidability, since to interpret at all is blindly to fill in a vacancy. And yet, as certainly, such silences cannot remain uninterpreted.

But the most notorious undecidables are Faith's pink ribbons, which have generated extensive critical commentary.⁷ The ribbons are mentioned at several points in the tale; however, the most momentous occasion takes place after young Goodman Brown cries out in grief after Faith.

But something fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.

“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.”

(83)

This passage suggests the dilemma of interpretation throughout the story: an arbitrary signifier is confronted and an interpretation, necessarily, follows. But the interpretation cannot be sustained from the signifier. (We have no way of knowing that this is Faith's ribbon or, if it is, that it denotes her being “gone” in the sense of having gone over to evil, etc.) Therefore, it is impossible, once more, to “verify” young Goodman Brown's interpretation. On the other hand, we must note that the interpretation is literally true, since Faith “has gone” in the sense that she does not here accompany young Goodman Brown. As in the case of the magis' rods, we are left with self-cancelling interpretations. These interpretations are not simply ambiguous; they are undecidable, because each is “potentially correct”; therefore, the necessity to interpret, to choose one interpretation, presupposes misinterpretation.

The recognition that all signifiers are ultimately undecidable, referring not to some presence but, endlessly, to other signifiers, is made clear in the story's climax, in which young Goodman Brown exhorts Faith to resist the wicked one by looking up to heaven. The idea that evil can be resisted by a gesture, by a reference, to something outside a signifier has everywhere been called into question by the tale: Faith is not a signified, a fixed entity whose “possession” could guarantee safety, much less salvation. Like the staffs, like the ribbons, like the silences, faith stands in need of an external signification which always escapes from it. Thus the narrator's final verdict (“We cannot know if Faith obeyed”) merely ratifies the story's undecidability.

III

The primary deconstruction showed us that by following young Goodman Brown, the fellow-traveller, and the narrator, the reader repeats the necessary misinterpretations they commit. When we arrive, with Brown, at the forest clearing, we witness with him, belatedly, the secondary deconstruction, the source of the errors necessitated by our own interpretation of the story. This moment occurs in the speech to the assembled characters by “the dark figure” or “the sable form.” The antinomian or gnostic content of the philosophy espoused in this speech has received adequate comment. In many ways this speech invites Brown to accede to a Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values.” The shock of Brown's recognition, of his resistance and his later reaction to this “ultimate” implication of the loss of signification has also received long and careful scrutiny, in an effort to establish the tale's judgment on Brown's lifelong misanthropy. But before we satisfy our understandable need to interpret the end of Brown's life, we should pause to consider how this Nietzschean conclusion is conveyed to him. We learn through the assumed speech of “the dark figure” or “the sable form.” But after we conjure in our minds the picture of some (male? female?) leader (of a “black” mass?), we understand that the words also refer to the words themselves, to the dark figures or inky signifiers we have been reading on the page, throughout “Young Goodman Brown.”

Attendant on this recognition is the retrospective acknowledgment that, in our attempt to interpret the story, we, too, have been making figures, especially personifications. For example, the use of the term “narrator” or “speaker” is precisely such a prosopopoeia—the presupposition of some speaking, human entity narrating a tale, whose voice and judgments ought to be reconciled with the story's action. But of course this has been but a fiction—a fiction necessary, it is true, as a precondition to making semantic sense of the tale. Nevertheless, the act of reading has made a young Goodman Brown out of the reader. And like him we may react with misanthropy that we have been gulled, that the betrayal of our faith was inherent in our first act of “suspending disbelief,” of extending faith to the storyteller, narrator, or author. In this way the reader may trace the path of his own illusions in Brown's.⁸

Notes

1. For example, B. Bernard Cohen argues that one probable source of the story was Christ's Fidelity by Deodat Lawson, whose rigid Calvinism Hawthorne subverted by presenting Brown's experiences as “even more spectral than the cases cited by Lawson” (361). Hawthorne's exaggerations culminate in the scene in which Brown is “irrevocably” pulled away from Faith. Frank Shuffleton sees in the tale Hawthorne's response to contemporary revival movements, especially the “old error [of self-righteousness] toward which Puritanism tended” (319). Michael Bell sees Brown as “a falling-off from the manhood of the first generation” of Puritans and considers such a decline “an inevitable result of the principles of the founders” (80, 81).

2. For example, in arguing that the story recounts the Freudian etiology of paranoia, Edward Jayne asserts that the story itself represents a delusional system similar to Brown's (109). Leo B. Levy anticipates part of my thesis in his claim that “the meaning of the story is that its own simple definitions do not work” (386). And even the historicist critic James W. Clark, Jr., sees Brown as “a willing convert like a new reader of a new author … he is reading and believing the devil's new book” (22). For a dissenting view of Williamson's argument, see Karen Hollinger's note.

3. This distinction between primary and secondary deconstructions was first formulated by Paul de Man: “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplemental figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration. As distinguished from primary deconstruction narratives centered on figures and ultimately always on metaphor, we call such narratives to the second (or third) degree allegories” (205). Accordingly, this essay claims no privilege for its own thesis. On the contrary, in keeping with de Man's concept of an allegory, it attempts in passing and in conclusion to uncover the probable sources of its own errors.

4. In addition to Fogle, Hostetler might also have added the following critics who identify the fellow-traveller as the devil, the Devil, or Satan: Cook (475), Jayne (103), Bell (78), Levy (376), and Liebman (160).

5. See Williamson (222) and Liebman (165).

6. Miller first used this term in his essay included in the collection American Criticism in the Poststructuralist Age (34); however, the concept is elaborated more fully in The Ethics of Reading.

7. Levy summarizes the many conflicting interpretations of Faith's pink ribbons (382-384) and concludes that they should be understood as forming the link between “two conceptions of Faith” (384)—generally, literal and figurative. But Levy, too, presumes when he states that the ribbon Brown seizes was from Faith's cap (377). In addition to the interpretations Levy discusses, Clark interprets them as evidence of Faith's fall (30); Cohen, as spectral evidence (357); and Liebman, as the last in a series of sensory illusions.

8. A shorter version of this paper was read at the International Conference on the Expressions of Evil in Literature, Philosophy and the Visual Arts, sponsored by West Georgia College, November 6-8, 1987, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Works Cited

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Cohen, B. Bernard. “Deodat Lawson's Christ's Fidelity and Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Essex Historical Collections 104 (1968), 349-370.

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Cook, Reginald. “The Forest of Goodman Brown's Night: A Reading of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” New England Quarterly 43 (1970): 473-481.

de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

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Hollinger, Karen. “‘Young Goodman Brown’: Hawthorne's ‘Devil in Manuscript’: A Rebuttal.” Studies in Short Fiction 19 (1982): 381-384.

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Jayne, Edward. “Pray Tarry With Me, Young Goodman Brown.” Literature and Psychology 29 (1979): 100-113.

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———. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

———. “Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.” PMLA 102 (1987): 281-291.

Shuffleton, Frank. “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Revival Movement.” American Transcendental Quarterly 44 (1979): 311-323.

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