[In the following essay, Davidson argues that Hawthorne's purpose in “Young Goodman Brown” was to demonstrate the power of an “evil thought” to corrupt psychologically and ultimately to lead an individual to “an evil deed.”]

One considers the number and variety of attempts made to clarify the meaning of “Young Goodman Brown”¹ and wonders whether there is perhaps some simpler explanation of the story than has been made. May it have been the author's purpose to have the reader realize keenly the transforming power and the paralyzing deceptiveness of an evil thought, which once entertained, starts into action subtle psychological processes against which one may make resolves but which, begun, proceed with increasing strength to demoniacal frenzy and the perpetration of an evil deed?

About the period of the publication of the story (1835), the author was displaying considerable interest in the relation of the “evil in every human heart” to evil thought and evil deed. In 1836, for example, he set down among themes for stories, the observation that evil may remain latent in the heart through a lifetime or may, through circumstance, be suddenly activated;² that a man may “flatter himself with the idea that he would not be guilty of some certain wickedness,—as, for instance, to yield to the personal temptations of the Devil,—yet to find ultimately, that he was at that very time committing that same wickedness.”³ Not later than 1836 he wrote “Fancy's Show-Box,” in which he stated that “It is not until the crime is accomplished that Guilt clinches its gripe upon the guilty heart, and claims it for its own” and expresses the hope “that all the dreadful consequences of sin will not be incurred, unless the act have set its seal upon the thought.”⁴

The over-all pattern Hawthorne employs in “Goodman Brown” is similar to that used by Shakespeare in the first two acts of Macbeth. Confused by the suggestion of evil lodged in his mind by the witches, Macbeth soliloquizes:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not

(I.iii.139-142).

Conflict follows between conscience and evil desire. He cannot put out of mind the prophecy that he will be king; neither is he willing to transform it to fact by murder; he wavers between but, despite his resolves to the contrary, moves toward the evil until his will is out of his control. Circumstances buttress the desire, as do outside persuasion and ocular illusion. The conflict ends as he announces, “I have done the deed” (italics added). Remorse and bitterness immediately ensue.⁵

In Macbeth and “Young Goodman Brown” the evil thought moves quickly to consummation; its course is a single night. Witchcraft is associated with events of both, as are deceptions of eye or ear or both and strange disorders in the natural world including “lamentings heard i’ the air.” The evil, however, to which Brown succumbs is more inclusive and profound than is murder; it is a cynical skepticism based in the conviction, falsely arrived at, that the nature and destiny of man are evil.

The theme Hawthorne is primarily interested in in “Young Goodman Brown,” is what he omits in The Scarlet Letter—the evil thought in its progress toward the guilty deed of which that work recounts only the consequences. Of the eighteen pages of the story as it appears in The Complete Works, the author allots one to the farewell between Brown and his wife, Faith: her plea that he not leave her on this particular night, his chiding her for doubt (the critical motive of the story), and his “Amen” to her “God bless you.” The final page is about the goodman's mental state after his harrowing experiences of the night. The sixteen pages intervening are the account of Brown's journey into the dark forest. In those pages Hawthorne traces the visible course Brown pursues, part way with a guide, and simultaneously the invisible inner journey from the time he entertains the evil thought to the moment when he pleads with Faith to “resist the wicked one.” The goodman's experiences he presents in four scenes, each closing with a halt in the travel, each successive one mounting in intensity beyond the preceding.

In the first the goodman enters the forest and meets the devil, with whom he has previously made tryst. When urged to mend his pace he comes to a full stop, resolved, now that he has kept his appointment, to return home. On his companion's suggesting, however, that they walk on, reasoning as they go, he “unconsciously” resumes his walk.

As they proceed he states his scruples against continuing the journey, but he continues: he would not violate family decorum or the respect he has for the traditional piety of his native region. These defenses his companion crushes with what seems to be some timely truth that comes as a surprise to Brown: the devil claims long and close acquaintance with the father and the grandfather,⁶ in whose image, it seems, he appears; and he has had an active part in the government of New England. Instead of coming to the rescue of his family and community, the goodman counters with another scruple, the awe in which he holds his minister. This meeting with ridicule, which “nettles” him, he pleads his love for his wife, who, he says, would be heart-broken if she knew his errand. With a sympathetic gesture concerning Faith and a placating suggestion that the goodman go his own way, the companion attempts to allay the resentment he has stirred. He quickly and deftly nullifies his seeming concession by casually directing Brown's attention to what purports to be the figure of Goody Cloyse on the path ahead. Brown conceals himself lest she see the company he is in but keeps watch. Her presence in the forest and her ease in conversing with the devil (as much an ocular deception as what seemed the movement of the snake carved on the devil's staff, for she disappears with mysterious suddenness),⁷ astonishes Brown and moves him deeply, for in his childhood she had been his religious counselor. Taking advantage of Brown's discomfiture, the companion urges more “speed,” and, as they move along, discourses “so aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of the auditor [Brown] than to be suggested by himself.” But when Brown sees twigs and little boughs of a freshly-plucked maple stick wither and dry up at the touch of his companion's hand, he “sat himself down on the stump of a tree and refused to go any farther.”⁸ So end the first and second phases of the journey of the irresolute goodman. Trust in family virtue, trust in the religious tradition of his community, trust in the sincerity and goodness of his childhood instructor have been subverted, and the devil's thought seems to have become one with his own.

His companion is so assured now of no deviation in him that he tosses him his maple staff and quickly vanishes. Ironically, Brown congratulates himself on his own exhibition of strength, rests complacently a few moments in the promise of meeting his minister next day with a clear conscience, of looking into the deacon's eyes unshrinkingly, and of spending the remainder of the passing night with Faith. His rosy contemplation is interrupted, however, by the sound of horses' hoofs. Then follow aural deceptions of the presence of deacon and minister on the forest path. Their conversation, penetrating his covert, convinces him they are bound to the same destination as he. He does not see them, though he makes an effort to do so, nor do they hinder his view of “the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed.” The shock he sustains causes him to “catch hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart” and to entertain doubt as to whether there is a heaven above him. Then, sight of the blue arch of the sky brings momentary assurance, and he makes one more resolve, that, with “heaven above and Faith below [he] will yet stand firm against the devil.” But even as he lifts his hands to pray,⁹ a cloud suddenly hides the stars; strange cries that seem to involve Faith mingle with the noises of wind in the trees, though he “doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest.” Another deception, optical and tactual, follows, as he watches a pink ribbon, emblem of Faith, flutter down and lodge on a branch, from which he seizes it. Actual? We hear no more of it until he reaches home and sees it decorating the head of his wife. Deluded fancy, however, convinces him his last bastion has crumbled. Grief, rage, and terror master him, and any shred of resistance he might yet possess fades. Confident now “[t]here is no good on earth; and sin … but a name,” he invokes the devil and, like Northumberland on hearing of the death of his son, invites the chaos of total disorder and darkness.

The tempo quickens. He sets forth again, this time at such speed as to appear “to fly along the forest path” until he reaches the scene of the witches' rendezvous. There he seems to hear a familiar tune, often sung at the village meetinghouse, but it trails off into “sounds of the benighted wilderness”; he think he recognizes in the congregation assembled a score of the “church members of Salem village,” though his sight, says the narrator, may have suffered from “gleams of light flashing over the obscure field.”¹⁰ Near the baptismal font he meets Faith, and the two stand, the only pair, so it seems, “who were yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world.” He cries to her to look to heaven and resist.¹¹ All, however, is but the deception of a mind seduced by evil; for, “hardly had he spoken when he found himself amid calm night and solitude,” staggering against a rock that felt chill and damp, his cheek sprinkled “with the coldest dew” from a twig that a moment before had seemed to be on fire.

The brief conclusion speaks of the immediate and the lasting effects on Goodman Brown of his night's adventure with an evil thought that got out of control. The story opens on a note of doubt spoken facetiously by Brown; it closes with his own doubt's expansion into cynical disbelief of any good in man. “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright!” Hawthorne wrote of Giovanni in “Rappaccini's Daughter”; “It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.”

Notes

1. F. N. Cherry, “The Sources of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” AL [American Literature], V (Jan., 1934), 342-348, states that the “chief interest … of the story lies in the graphic portrayal of a witches' Sabbath” and introduces in partial support of this view some details Hawthorne probably found in Cervantes' El Coloquio de los Perros. In interpreting the story the critic assumes that the characters whom Brown saw or heard in the forest practiced witchcraft. Richard Fogle, “Ambiguity and Clarity in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” NEQ [The New England Quarterly], XVIII (Dec., 1945), 448-465, treats what he considers ambiguities in the story and analyzes the near-flawless art that harmonizes them with the story. Thomas E. Connolly, “‘Young Goodman Brown,’ an Attack on Puritanic Calvinism,” AL, XXVIII (Nov., 1956), 370-375, examines the story as satire. D. C. McKeithan, “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’: an Interpretation,” MLN, LXVII (Feb., 1952), 95-96, states, correctly I believe, that the story is that of a “man [everyman] whose sin led him to consider all other people sinful.” Mark Van Doren, The Best of Hawthorne (N.Y., 1951), presents some similarities between the story and The Scarlet Letter and perceptively points out the failure of both Brown and Dimmesdale to understand “the presence of evil inside the imagination,” and how, “when Brown is made aware of it … it becomes a monster with which he cannot cope … a monster of his own making.” (p. 416)

2. The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wayside ed., 13 vols. (Boston, n. d.), IX, 43. Subsequent references to Hawthorne's Works are to this edition.

3. Ibid., IX, 38.

4. Ibid., I, 256, 257. Italics added. This relationship of evil thought to evil deed may have been suggested by Isabella in her plea for Angelo (Measure for Measure, V.i.446-451).

5. Cf. the first 679 lines of The Rape of Lucrece for another example of the pattern. Of Tarquin, Shakespeare says that “some untimely thought did instigate / His all too timeless speed” (11. 43-44). Later Tarquin reviews his conflict (11. 498-504) from his conceiving the thought to the moment before the commission of the deed: the strife within his soul, his consciousness of the consequences of his act, his wavering, his loss of self-control. The last three acts of Othello exemplify an extended and complex form of this pattern.

6. Brown's companion is perhaps telling the truth here for a purpose; Brown later thinks he has a vision of his father beckoning him toward the devil's baptismal font. Cf. Banquo's observation on the “instruments of darkness” sometimes telling truths “to win us to our harm” (Macbeth, I.iii.122-126).

7. Cf. Macbeth, II.i.33-34: “Is this a dagger that I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” And Banquo, after the first meeting with the witches questioned, “Were such things here as we do speak about?” (I.iii.83)

8. Cf. Macbeth, I.vii.31: “We will proceed no further in this business.”

9. Cf. Macbeth, II.ii.28-31.

10. Throughout the story Hawthorne employs a device that is common to all his fiction—a sly casting of doubt on any experience he records as fact which is, on the face of it preternatural, supernatural, or highly unusual. This device has, I think, caused some critics to find ambiguities in his work where, perhaps, none exists.

11. Brown, of course, “had no power to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought …” (Hawthorne, Works, II, 102).