[In the following essay, Johnson discusses “Young Goodman Brown” in light of the Puritan doctrine of justification—the idea that God will “justify” sinners who recognize themselves as such and seek divine help. Johnson argues that Brown's actions are an example of false justification because he never admits to his own sinful nature.]

Criticism of “Young Goodman Brown” has traditionally been divided into speculations about the nature of the hero's journey. Was it a dream? Or was it reality? Newton Arvin is usually cited as representative of the view that Goodman Brown received a true vision of human depravity in the woods, and F. O. Matthiessen is representative of the view that the sins witnessed by young Goodman Brown were creatures of his own making.¹ Almost no modern critic supports Arvin's view, however, so the old argument rarely arises in the old way. Questions about the reality of the story and Brown's relationship to it continue to interest critics, however.² A new dimension is given the problem of Goodman Brown's relation to a special kind of reality in the light of what we know and what Hawthorne knew about the Puritan doctrine of justification, a belief which has to be understood in terms of Covenant Theology.³ The Puritan believed that, since Adam broke the first covenant with God in the Garden of Eden, man labored under the burden of God's wrath. However, God had made a second covenant which gave man hope for some respite from God's wrath during man's life on the earth; at a time of His choosing, God might open the hearts of certain men, allowing them to descend within in order to know themselves. All things on which they had depended and all pride were mortified. Only when they had lost self in this experience would they turn to God who, subsequently, lifted the sinners up and justified them, changing their relationships to God and making their lives on earth a little easier without the burden of God's wrath.

The Puritan minister gave considerable attention not only to what justification was, but to what it was not. He knew that many sinners had convinced themselves that they had made the justifying descent when, in fact, they had not. It was the Puritan minister's duty to urge self-scrutiny in this matter. If the sinner believed that he had been completely helpless in initiating his descent and had been utterly reduced by a “sense” of sin, then he had probably known a “true” descent. If, on the other hand, he thought that he had been in some small way responsible for initiating the descent, if he had been aware of an iota of goodness within himself at the time of descent, or if he had only “known” his sins without “having a sense” of them, then his had been a false or a mock descent. He could not, therefore, expect that he would be justified.

Young Goodman Brown's journey is just such a mock descent in the Puritan tradition. Like the Puritan sinner, he begins what seems to be a journey into an inner inferno. The landscape through which he travels is but a hellish externalization of his own heart. He encounters the fiend, who also rages in his own breast, and fiend worshippers. He hears hell's “awful harmony” of inhuman sounds and perverse hymns. He sees the “lurid” red blaze against the sky. The witches' sabbath is, like Milton's picture of hell, an inverse heaven: the harmonious music of heaven is discord here; the light, unlike that of heaven, “is “as one great Furnace, flam’d yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible. …”⁴ The once-angelic company is transformed, and the gathering in “Young Goodman Brown” is like the gathering of the fiends in Pandemonium around the throne of Satan to discuss the fate of Adam and Eve.

As if he were in the traditional Puritan descent, Goodman Brown's various “props” or “crutches,” those things on which he has depended, fall from under him. The father, the teacher, the state, the community, the church, the concept of womanhood are all challenged during his journey. But Goodman Brown's journey is far from being a genuine justifying descent. The story is, rather, similar to the Puritan minister's detailed description of the false descent, and young Goodman Brown is a paradigm for Hawthorne's negative definition of the unregenerate man whose incomplete experience with hell perverts his vision and warps his life.

Regeneration is only possible if one's sense of his own sin is as profound as that which the Puritans described in the genuine humiliation: the man in the throes of a true descent must feel that he is the most wretched creature on the earth and must know a mortification of pride in particular. To be sure, Goodman Brown knows despair and feels his own rational limitation in coping with the universe, but in no way would this hellish journey to a witches' sabbath be construed by the Puritans as a genuine descent, for Goodman Brown feels the depravity of others but not the full extent of his own.

Although the reader sees Goodman Brown as “the chief horror of the scene” (p. 99) Goodman Brown has no such vision of himself. In his decision to rage toward the witches' sabbath, he sees himself as choosing through pride to out-do the devil: “Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you” (ibid.). His descent does not bring him to a vision of his own helplessness and sinfulness. Rather, from motives of despair and revenge, he initially believes that he can willingly choose to combat evil. It is Faith's sinfulness that embitters him, not his own. Furthermore, his return to the village finds him piously snatching little children from the clutches of their teachers as if he, alone, were untainted.

Momentarily he feels, with repugnance, a sense of brotherhood with the community, but that which keeps Goodman Brown in gloom is the vision given those who partake of the devil's baptism: that he would ever be “more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought,” than he could ever be of his own (p. 104). This is conclusive evidence that Goodman Brown's descent was not genuine.

The point is not that a vision of dark reality (of either himself or of others) has warped his life. What he has seen is not a true vision of others or himself. His has been a mock journey, a false vision. Though the landscape of his heart was available to him, he never saw the true extent of its terrors. Like the passengers on the Celestial Railroad, he never exposes himself to the landscape and is, thus, never sufficiently humiliated to ascend in love to a new life. The dark vision he saw was not nearly so dark as the one he should have seen but did not see. Like the stock example of the deluded, self-satisfied man of the justification sermon, young Goodman Brown stands as a negative definition of the true regenerative descent.

Notes

1. Newton Arvin, Hawthorne Boston: Little, Brown, 1929); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).

2. Richard P. Adams, “Hawthorne's ‘Provincial Tales,’” New England Quarterly, 30 (March, 1957), 39; Richard Harter Fogle, “Ambiguity and Clarity in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” New England Quarterly, 18 (December, 1943), 448-465; David Levin, “Shadows of Doubt: Spectral Evidence in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” American Literature, 34 (May, 1963), 218-225; Taylor Stoehr, “‘Young Goodman Brown’ and Hawthorne's Theory of Mimesis,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23 (March, 1969), 393-409; Thomas F. Walsh, Jr., “The Bedeviling of Young Goodman Brown,” Modern Language Quarterly, 19 (December, 1958), 331-336. Walsh doesn’t believe that the reader can know or has to know whether the experience was real or a dream: rather one gets at the meaning offered to him by examining certain symbolic patterns. David Levin argues that the reader mistakenly supposes that the devil speaks for Hawthorne, whereas, the devil lies and all of his spectral evidence is untrustworthy. Stoehr believes that the whole point of the story is the relationship between fact and fiction. Goodman Brown is damned because he accepts the dream as reality through lack of faith. Fogle and Adams also stress Goodman Brown's dilemma of uncertainty. Adams notes that, “Having refused to look at evil, he is left in a state of moral uncertainty that is worse, in a way, than evil itself.”

3. Almost all justification sermons contain some statement about Covenant Theology but succinct statements of the Covenant and justification, with which the American Puritans would agree, appear in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, Books II, III (Philadelphia, MCMLX). The following is a selection of justification sermons which serve to clarify the doctrine: William Dewsbury, A Sermon on the Important Doctrine of Regeneration (Philadelphia, 1740); Giles Firmin, The Real Christian (Boston, 1742); Cotton Mather, The Everlasting Gospel (Philadelphia, 1767); Samuel Mather, The Self-Justiciary Convicted (Boston, 1707); Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert (Philadelphia, 1664); Gilbert Tennent, The Duty of Self Examination (Boston, 1739); Samuel Willard, A Brief Discourse on Justification (Boston, 1686).

4. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 10.