[In the following essay, Mosher uses a structuralist critical approach to focus on contradictions in meaning and on the reader's relationship with the narrator in “Young Goodman Brown”.]

As Jonathan Culler has observed, the structuralist method, based on the linguistic model, should “account for our judgments about meaning and ambiguity, well-formedness and deviance.” The structuralist critic studies the conventions of any system that enables its signs to produce meaning or certain effects. He does not primarily study meaning or seek to formulate new interpretations; rather he examines how meaning or effects are achieved.¹ In such analyses, of course, consideration of meaning cannot be ignored. Thus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, by a method that consists of “dividing the syntagmatic sequence into superposable segments, and in proving that they constitute variations on one and the same theme,” studies patterns of opposition that produce meaning in myths.² A. J. Greimas has developed the “semiotic square” to account for even more complex relations governed by the principles of contradiction and contrariness.³ Similarly, a structuralist reading of Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown,” rather than revealing new meaning, concentrates on how the story produces its ambiguities as well as how it suggests an unambiguous meaning. Using Lévi-Strauss' method, I propose to examine the structure of oppositions in the syntagmatic chain, and adapting other structuralist methods suggested by Gérard Genette, Gerald Prince, and Seymour Chatman,⁴ I shall study the contradictions of meaning between and within the unmediated and mediated elements of the discourse, essentially involving the reader's relationship with the narrator and the characters.

Certainly the ambiguity that has created so much critical debate, resulting most obviously from the narrator's refusal to answer his own question about Brown's dream, is real. “Young Goodman Brown” is not unique in this respect in Hawthorne's corpus, sharing at least its moral ambiguity with that in such other major works as “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and The Scarlet Letter.⁵ In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne, like his admirer Henry James, tries to create in his readers the same moral ambiguity that confronts his characters while suggesting, often very subtly, the implied author's judgments. Contradictions abound, leading in the imperfect reader (the “narratee” in Gerald Prince's terms)⁶ to a confusion similar to the one Brown feels, but at the same time much evidence indicates the implied author's condemnation of Brown's final behavior.

In making these conclusions, I am, of course, not alone. Many critics have pointed out that the ambiguities of the story make a judgment about Brown's condemnation of his fellow villagers virtually impossible.⁷ On the other hand, while some think that Brown did experience the forest events and is right in his condemnation of the villagers, still others believe that Brown dreamed or imagined the forest events and is wrong in his condemnation. Sheldon W. Liebman's 1975 article on the story, with which I am basically in agreement, provides a succinct classification of the studies subscribing to these three views and then, while recognizing the story's “diverting ambiguities” on unresolvable and relatively unimportant issues, argues that the story is unambiguous, if one attends closely to point of view, in showing Brown to be a victim of his own thoughts.⁸ Liebman, however, provides no clear basis for distinguishing the narrator's point of view from Brown's, claiming that by the principle of “dissimulated point of view” the focus shifts “imperceptibly from narrator to character so that the reader sees through the character's eyes even when he thinks he is seeing through the narrator's” (p. 158). Though Liebman is right in pointing out the many verbs indicating Brown's perception of the action after he leaves Faith, his generalization that thenceforth Hawthorne reports subjective action as if it were objectively happening is open to question and is in fact contradicted, as shall be seen, by Liebman himself. One might, for example, agree with Liebman that the adjective “excellent” describing Brown's” “resolve” as he hurries into the forest could represent Brown's interest point of view⁹ (or it could, as Richard H. Fogle claims,¹⁰ express the narrator's irony), but the following remark about the solitary traveller is evidently the narrator's editorial, identified by its generalizing sense and use of the present tense: “and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.”¹¹

A similar claim to Liebman's that the action of the central part of the story is seen exclusively from Brown's point of view is made by Thomas F. Walsh, Jr., who believes, however, that a study of point of view throws no light on the ambiguities.¹² But Walsh mistakenly identifies the narrator's editorial on man's instinct for evil as Brown's thought and then contradicts his claim for the consistency of Brown's point of view by ascribing to “Hawthorne” the judgment of Brown as “the chief horror” (pp. 334-335). Likewise, David Levin identifies the point of view as Brown's in the paragraph describing the baptism preparations where a shift to the narrator's point of view at least temporarily occurs in the description of Brown's and Faith's hesitating on the verge of evil. Levin argues from the assumption of consistency in point of view, but even a Jamesian consistency involves switches from the central consciousness to the narrator.¹³ Agreeing with Levin, Darrel Abel compares Brown's sole authority to the governess' in James' The Turn of the Screw, “verifiable by no other observer or ‘control.’”¹⁴ But The Turn of the Screw is told in the first person, not in the third-person selective omniscient mode of “Young Goodman Brown.” Furthermore, if the action is viewed exclusively from Brown's point of view, we have to accept such contradictions as his revering his father while picturing him in the devil's guise, as E. Arthur Robinson observes.¹⁵ Although in dreams such contradictions can occur, the text does not clearly set off the real world from the dream world. Even if we were to accept the forest episode as the dream, the narrator's voice and focus are still present periodically throughout the discourse and are distinguishable, at least in many places, from Brown's.

To neglect the switches in point of view which can reveal the narrator's presence and interpretation is to ignore what Leo Levy describes as the mixed realistic/objective and allegorical/subjective nature of the tale whose narrator “moves into Brown's state of mind and then outward” elusively.¹⁶ Although many of these critics' conclusions about the tale's meaning are not invalid, often their analyses of Hawthorne's techniques would benefit from more attention to detail. To examine these techniques in greater depth, I plan to analyze not only the story's structure but also its point of view and particularly what Genette calls “paralipses,” omissions by the omniscient narrator (p. 212). Agreeing with much recent criticism, I assume that the implied author intends certain ambiguities because he allows his narrator to leave them unresolved, especially the one on the nature of the action in the forest. I shall also argue that the condemnation of Brown is relatively unambiguous. What I propose to study are the methods by which both the ambiguities and the condemnation are conveyed to the reader.

I will begin with probably the greatest source of ambiguity in “Young Goodman Brown”—the unmediated or nonnarrated parts, what characters say and think about themselves and each other and what characters do, as recorded by a relatively “absent” narrator. In Chatman's terminology, the narrator may be either “overt”—describing, summarizing, characterizing, judging, generalizing, and commenting on the discourse (pp. 219-253)—or “covert”—reporting characters' words and thoughts in indirect discourse and its variations (pp. 196-219)—or “absent”—reporting characters' words and thoughts in direct discourse and its variations. This last is considered unmediated narration whereas the first two are mediated (pp. 146-194). The story's beginning emphasizes by dramatic (unmediated) interpretation or characterization the moods of Faith, Brown's wife. The message that the narratee receives directly from her speech is that she is “troubled” and “afeared of herself” for this “of all nights in the year,” and her parting husband also analyzes directly her mood in his thoughts as “melancholy” and troubled by the warnings of her dreams. Furthermore, Brown characterizes Faith as an “angel,” in contrast to himself, whom he dramatically and indirectly characterizes as temporarily belonging to another persuasion, at least until the morrow (pp. 74-75).¹⁷ This portrait of the wife concerned for her husband seems to accord with the vision of Faith joyfully welcoming Brown the next morning on his return, but her concern for her own steadfastness might just as well be indirectly conveyed by these remarks and especially by her caution to Brown, “may you find all well when you come back” (p. 74). These stasis statements not only expose ambiguous traits and moods of existents (characters), but at the same time project by implied prolepsis (flashforward) events in the future of the plot and thus create suspense, another from of uncertainty.¹⁸ Of what is Faith afraid? What will possibly change the next day's situation?

Brown's character traits are even more evidently self-contradictory, paradigmatically, and are presented, at least dramatically, in the syntagmatic pattern of alternating oppositions, typical of the story's plot.¹⁹ Early he characterizes himself as eliciting doubt from Faith, as being a “wretch,” and as having “scruples” for this “one night” after which he will follow Faith “to heaven” (p. 75). In contrast, Brown describes himself to the figure in the forest as one of a “race of honest men and good Christians,” who “abide no such wickedness” and vows to return to Faith to avoid this “wickedly” spent night and his feeling of guilt (pp. 77, 81). Despite these professions of goodness, Brown continues deeper into the forest, and, confronted with various spectacles of temptation to pursue evil, he embraces the opportunity to follow the call of the wilderness and identifies with the brotherhood of the wicked, having found his true nature, as the witch minister tells him, inherited from his grandfather and father. The last macro-episode or large segment in the syntagmatic chain shows Brown again resisting evil, or what he considers to be evil, in the form of his fellow citizens, including Faith.

The flat characters, who tend to be part of the setting in accordance with Chatman's distinction between bona fide characters and named but unimportant ones (p. 141), are also characterized contradictorily by unmediated or dramatic means. Brown calls Deacon Gookin and the minister “holy” and Goody Cloyse “pious and exemplary” (pp. 82, 78). Again, however, in the typical pattern of alternating contrasts, this portrait of the villagers is contradicted by framing sets of dramatic characterizations, which picture Cloyse's and Brown's ancestors as friends of the devil in the earlier part of the plot and, in the final part, the deacon and minister as involved in “deviltry” and the whole village as steeped in sin.²⁰ Finally, the devil is somewhat less ambiguously characterized, the syntagmatic pattern being a simple two-part opposition between his first appearance in “grave and decent attire” in the person of Brown's grandfather (as is learned later from Goody Cloyse) and his gradual identification as the devil until he is directly named so by Cloyse. By such contradictory dramatic characterizations, the story and discourse involve the narratee in the moral ambiguities confronting Brown.

According to the conventions of most nineteenth-century fiction, the implied reader could usually count on the omniscient reliable narrator to convey overtly through the narratee the “truth” of the narrative, as the implied author intends it. This is not entirely the case in Hawthorne's tale, beginning with the overtly mediated interpretation of Faith, who is “aptly named.” The narratee might accept this trait only up to a certain point in the plot; after the cloud, which seems to Brown to contain Faith's voice, has passed overhead, something flutters down, and Brown “beheld a pink ribbon.” The mystery is resolved for Brown, who decides on the basis of this ocular evidence that his “Faith is gone” (p. 83). To the narratee caught up in the excitement of this discovery, the evidence of Faith's guilt might also be convincing, but a narratee closer to the implied reader might look more analytically at the point of view and decide that this token of Faith's infidelity is perceived through Brown's interest point of view and therefore is not evidence for a “fact” of the ribbon's existence. The narrator has only reported that “something fluttered lightly down.”²¹ This more perceptive narratee might take the description of the ribbon as the narrator's report of what Brown thinks he sees; that is, the narrator is reliable in characterizing Faith as “aptly named” and in reporting strictly what happens in Brown's mind, though the narrator does not comment on the “truth” of those thoughts. A sort of paralipsis has occurred.²²

Thus the contradictions that seem to abound in the narrator's characterizations and judgments of the Salem villagers may turn out not to be his self-contradictions at all when the point of view is scrutinized. For example, Goody Cloyse is judged to be “pious” (p. 78) and an “excellent old Christian” (p. 89); the “good old minister” is characterized as a “venerable saint” (p. 88). When elsewhere these citizens are called “fiend worshippers” (pp. 87, 88), point of view plays an ambiguous role. Although the judgment of Cloyse as “pious” might very well be Brown's, these other characterizations could be either Brown's or the narrator's. Likewise, during the witches' sabbath episode, it is sometimes not clear whether the action is seen through Brown's eyes or the narrator's. By the omnitemporal analeptic (Genette's term for flashback, p. 82) and proleptic description of these very faces' devout and benign looks, the point of view seems to be the narrator's, but if so, he is describing only the appearance of faces, not necessarily character. Even the presence of the governor's wife is qualified by the narrator's dubious “Some affirm” (p. 85). After the narrator asserts the presence of other Salem villagers including “high dames” and “church members of … especial sanctity,” he leaves their attendance at the ceremony open to question by switching to Brown's “bedazzled” (p. 85) point of view. The physical, metaphysical, and moral confusions continue as the narratee must reconcile the presence of these people at a witches' sabbath with the narrator's characterization of them as “grave, reputable, and pious” (p. 85). Moreover, in this passage, the narrator uses the very terms—“Good old Deacon Gookin” and “venerable saint”—in which he describes the same characters as they appear in Salem the next day (pp. 88-89). Such a contradiction may indicate the narrator's ironic stance or his unreliability, or it may suggest disagreement between his judgment of the villagers' piety and Brown's conception of their wickedness, or an identification of his language with Brown's in reporting Brown's point of view.

In addition to this manipulation of point of view, the narratee is also subjected to other paralipses. Some minor examples include the narrator's hesitant description of the minister of the witches' sabbath as one who “bore no slight similitude … to some grave divine” (p. 86) and whose “once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race” (pp. 87-88). The narratee will probably recognize him as the devil in yet another disguise. The narrator also hesitates in this episode to identify the contents of the communion cup as being either “water, reddened by the lurid light” or “blood” or “liquid flame” (p. 88). Earlier the narrator had analyzed Goody Cloyse's mutterings as “a prayer, doubtless” (p. 79), as if he were not sure, just as he is not certain about the dark figure's staff: that it could “almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent” “must have been an ocular deception” (p. 76). It is certainly difficult at this point in the tale for the narratee to decide if the narrator is speaking ironically (describing indirectly or implicitly), implying that the staff is actually a snake, or describing directly what is the “truth”—that the form of the staff and the light were deceptive. As Victor Vitanza points out,²³ from the point in the plot at which Brown passes “a crook of the road” and sees a “figure of a man” (p. 75), the rest of the action might be recuperated, in Jonathan Culler's term, as a delusion, except that the narrator does seem to assert the objective existence of “these two,” Brown and the figure (p. 76).

In contrast, these paralipses and apparent contradictions yield to the narrator's consistency in his characterization and judgments of Brown, who is pictured as “evil” (p. 75), a “horror” (p. 83), “frightful” (p. 83), “demoniac” (p. 84), and a “polluted” wretch (p. 88). One of the major ironies of the tale should be mentioned. As opposed to Brown's and the narrator's paraliptic ignorance about the outcome of Faith's indoctrination into the knowledge of evil, the implied reader must observe what apparently is Brown's awareness of evil by the end of the plot when he sees evil or thinks he sees it everywhere, fulfilling the promise of the “sable form.” The narratee might be tempted to conclude that Brown's successful quest for evil turns him into evil, as Brown's own identification with the wicked brotherhood and the wilderness attests. At any rate, the result is, as the narrator characterizes Brown at the end of the story, a “stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” (p. 89), suffering the effects of his search. Does the implied author intend the implied reader to conclude that in a tale of conflicting binary oppositions in the characterizations and judgments of all the other characters, where these oppositions do not exist, the “truth” of the fiction lies? One of the narrator's few generalizations would seem to support this conclusion about Brown's evil nature and consequently mistaken opinion about the evil of life (one delusion leads to another): “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man” (p. 84).

But before deciding this matter, I want to look at some of the events, in addition to the existents, both narrated and nonnarrated (Chatman's synonyms for mediated and unmediated). Actually the mutterings of Goody Cloyse and the incident of the staff may be considered not only as integrative indices (signs) of character but also as satellites (minor events), or part of the distributive chain of functions (actions).²⁴ As already noted, the discourse treated them paraliptically. Paralipsis is a mark of this discourse's narrating other events as well and would therefore seem to be, in turn, an indirect dramatic index of the narrator's unreliability or else his manipulation of the narratee, effected by the narrator's inability, on one hand, or his refusal, on the other, to tell what “really” happened. Thus the narrator's discourse is filled with expressions of doubt. For example, when the dark figure gives his staff to Goody Cloyse, the narrator observes that “perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian Magi” (p. 79). At first, such an indirect authorial identification of the figure with the devil seems clear, but the “perhaps” modifies not only the “fact” of the transformation of the rod into life but also the reason for that transformation. The narrator might be said to be speculating ironically on a popular explanation of the transformation, if, indeed, a transformation occurred. Or again the narrator tells the narratee that the minister and Deacon Gookin “appeared to pass along the road … ; but owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that particular spot, neither … were visible” (p. 81). The narrator ambiguously both asserts the existence of the “hoof tramps and the voices of the riders” and “their figures” and seems to deny their reality with the qualifiers “appeared” and “neither … were visible.”²⁵ Although the point of view here is not always the narrator's, it might well be argued that the narrator is attempting to “naturalize” supernatural events by physical or historical explanations to assure the narratee, at least in this second example, that the figures are people who are there but invisible because of the dark, not apparitions or delusions in Brown's mind. But such reassurances are contradicted paradigmatically by the pervading atmosphere of the supernatural: the miracle of Satan's staff and the “haunted” forest, for instance. Of course, one could argue also that the narrator is ironic and only pretending to convince the narratee that the rod assumed living form or that the people are “real,” while expecting the implied reader to realize that the narration is indirect and that these are phantoms of evil or appearances only to Brown. Or, again, the position that the point of view is partly Brown's, at least in the vision of the minister and deacon, can also be argued.²⁶

Similar to this trait of the narrator's to imply that supernatural appearance might be explained realistically is the “seems” expression. After describing what to Brown is convincing evidence of Faith's guilt in the form of the ribbon, the narrator says that Brown “seemed to fly along the forest-path rather than to walk or run” (p. 83). Here the narrator's incompetence to report what “really” occurred would appear clear because the point of view can only be his. Later he narrates the hesitancy of Faith and Brown before the baptismal font—“there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness” (p. 88)—as if the narrator did not know how many other pairs might also be hesitating.²⁷ But these expressions of appearance could also be interpreted simply as common exaggerations which the narrator expects the implied reader to detect. By far the most often repeated expression of paralipsis is “as if.” The devil, after Goody Cloyse's disappearance, waits “calmly as if nothing had happened” (p. 80). He disappears “as if he had vanished” (p. 80). Sounds are heard, “as if from the depths of the cloud” (p. 82); their echoes mock “as if bewildered wretches were seeking” Faith (p. 83). Again, though, the doubt could be ascribed to the ambiguity of point of view: these observations might be Brown's.

Other paraliptic measures serve the same purpose of confusing the narratee by either contradicting or asserting and denying. As already noted, the narrator will switch point of view without warning. At the witches' sabbath the identifying of the congregation seems to be in the omniscient narrator's register, but this changes to a simple report of what, in an obscure prolepsis, “Some affirm” (p. 85). The same passage continues, “Either the sudden gleam of light … bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members” (p. 85). The narrator is not sure exactly whom Brown sees, if anybody. Such uncertainty might, however, again be ascribed to the narrator's “naturalizing” Brown's hallucination. Switching from Brown's view, the narrator then offers his own judgment of the hymn in the short generalization that it expresses what “our nature can conceive of sin” (p. 85; the first person is a sign of the narrator's voice), and concludes in another editorial, “Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends” (p. 85). These two generalizations are somewhat self-contradictory in asserting both the common knowledge and the ignorance of sin. Further, the first one seems to contradict a conclusion about the exclusive evil of Brown. But because generalizations, though perhaps inspired by the fictional action, point outside that action, these are not necessarily commenting on this particular congregation. At the same time, however, the generalization about shared evil serves its contradictory purpose of ironically implicating others, including the narratee, in Brown's evil while seeming to place that evil exclusively in the congregation at the witches' sabbath. On the other hand, the narrator, earlier in the discourse, might seem to be asserting the morality of that congregation. With the same phrase, “In truth” (p. 83), he had used to judge Brown's frightfulness as he ran madly toward evil, the narrator replies to Brown's dramatic characterization of the congregation as a “grave and dark-clad company” by commenting, “In truth, they were such” (p. 84). But this is only a comment on the appearance of the multitude and is not necessarily making a character judgment. In the same episode the narrator might seem to naturalize the supernatural fire by describing it to be like one in a clearing where felled trees burn, but he immediately cancels this reassuring, realistic impression by saying that only the tops of the pines were burning, “like candles at an evening meeting” (p. 84). The narratee is continually made a victim of apparently reliable commentary that subsequently seems to be denied but seldom provides a firm basis for a definitive judgment.

Again, though, the narratee might conclude that these binary oppositions serve to emphasize the unambiguous theme that the narrator is only reporting the conflicting delusions of a fanatic's mind. Evidence for this view might include the description of the tempest that accompanies Brown's apparent conversion. When the cloud first appears hurrying across the sky, the narrator says that “no wind was stirring” (p. 82) and later that the sky was “clear and silent” (p. 83), but when Brown then accepts evil and hurries off to look for it, the narrator reports that the trees creaked and the “wind tolled” (p. 83), becoming a “tempest” (p. 84) swelling in the hymn at the Ceremony. After Brown calls on Faith to abandon wickedness, he finds himself in a calm, as the wind's roar dies away. The narrator might intend us to interpret the wind as an objective correlative of Brown's excited delusion or, less metacritically, as part of his delusion.²⁸ Of course, the most obvious paralipsis creating ambiguity is the narrator's raising the question addressed directly to the narratee, suggesting that Brown might have just dreamed this action. On one hand, the narrator seems to answer his own question: “it was a dream of evil omen”; but on the other, this assertion is qualified by the preceding clause—“Be it so, if you will” (p. 89)—as if the identification of the experience as a dream depended on the narratee's decision and is therefore a subjective choice and relatively unimportant. According to the narrator, only the consequences of Brown's experience are significant, being “of evil omen” (p. 89), for the rest of his life and his death were “gloom” (p. 90).

The paradigmatic pattern of binary oppositions or contradictions for the existents is also evident in the syntagmatic structure of the plot's narremes or shorter events.²⁹ In most of the plot, the alternation between the assurance that life in the story is or can be normal, “real,” or good and the doubt or suspicion that it is odd, supernatural, or evil is strikingly regular. For instance, the plot begins with a normal leave-taking, but this normalcy is immediately questioned by Faith's warnings. This is followed by Brown's recognition of his extraordinary errand. His prolepsis about following Faith to heaven after this particular night is undermined by the narrator's judgment of his “present evil purpose” (p. 75) and by the appearance in the forest of the suspicious dark figure. This regular alternation continues until the meeting with Goody Cloyse, during which several narremes elicit doubt about the goodness and normalcy of life. A similar span of unsettling narremes occurs after Brown discovers the pink ribbon, but the alternation resumes when Brown believes that the figure of his mother warns him away from the initiation ceremony. The pattern continues to the end of the plot with such reassuring narremes as Faith's and Brown's hesitation before the baptismal font, Brown's warning to Faith, the disappearance of the vision of the witches' sabbath, and the question from the narrator suggesting that Brown had only dreamed this experience. These narremes alternate with Brown's irresistible attraction to the ceremony, the dark form's description of evil pervading the world, the preparation for baptism, Brown's doubt in Faith's refusal of the baptism, his unusual behavior the next morning in Salem, and finally his ensuing darkened life.

Lévi-Strauss has warned that the oversimplification involved in establishing binary oppositions can result in the contrasting items being changed or distorted beyond recognition.³⁰ To try to avoid this error, I have multiplied the categories to cover different situations: normal, real, and good are opposed to odd, supernatural, and evil. One must also consider that the identification of this paradigmatic pattern of alternation depends on the recognition of the syntagmatic progress of the narremes that fulfill the pattern. Oversimplification results also from the narratee's failure to see the variations within this pattern. There is in Brown an increasing realization of and attraction to evil as the doubting narremes increase somewhat in quantity and, much more significantly, in importance, particularly in the witches' sabbath episode. Another subtle change that the pattern alone does not reveal is that Brown first denies, then accepts the existence of evil in others and eventually recognizes it also in himself. From a patient enduring happenings, Brown becomes an agent causing actions in his search for evil and then returns to being a patient enduring the evil in himself or ineffectively resisting the evil outside himself.³¹ Ultimately we might say that the pattern of doubt and assurance and its subtle variations dramatize the insidious self-persuasion in Brown, and possibly in the narratee, of the prevalence of evil in the world. Brown, at any rate, comes to an assurance that the world is evil, not good, and at least one type of narratee might also be encouraged to doubt that it is entirely good, “real,” and normal. Furthermore, because of the network of conflicting characterizations, the narrator's paralipses, contradictions, and ambiguous and switching points of view, as well as the pattern of alternating doubt and assurance, the narratee in the end may not be able to decide whether Brown's rejection of the world receives the author's commendation as a refusal of evil or his condemnation as a result of an immersion in the knowledge of evil. I have suggested that close analysis reveals that Brown is responsible for many questionable judgments which an undiscriminating narratee might assign to the narrator, and I have further argued that the narrator's consistently unfavorable judgment of Brown may reveal the implied author's preference for condemning Brown. Whether one accepts this conclusion or prefers, using Wayne Booth's principle of “unstable irony,”³² the interpretation accepting the story's ultimate ambiguity, the structuralist critic has learned, by studying the story's pattern and the discourse's manipulation of point of view, something about the sources and effects of that ambiguity.

Notes

1. Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 31.

2. The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 307.

3. Du Sens (Paris: Seuil, 1970).

4. Genetee, “Discourse du récit” in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 65-273; Prince, “Introduction à l’étude du narrataire,” Poétique, 14 (1973), 178-196; Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).

5. Regarding this problem of ambiguity, and more specifically its source, Edgar A. Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 138, notes that in “The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables it is difficult to distinguish between fiction and history, imagination and perception.”

6. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 70-71, is, of course, responsible for the term “implied author,” the real author's other self, invented as the moving principle for the fiction. Gerald Prince, “Introduction,” pp. 179-187, makes careful distinctions among types of readers and narratees. See also Chatman, pp. 33; 147-151; 253-262, on narratee, narrator, implied author, and implied reader.

7. Referring to the realistic and the fantastic readings of the story, Charles Child Walcutt, Man's Changing Mask (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 126, remarks that “Hawthorne … has interwoven these two possibilities so tightly that it is impossible to show that either one represents the accurate reading of the story.”

8. “The Reader in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1975, ed. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (Englewood, Colo.: Microcard Editions Books, 1975), pp. 156-169. See Liebman's review of some of the scholarship, p. 157, and also Robert J. Stanton, “Secondary Studies on Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ 1845-1975: A Bibliography,” Bulletin of Bibliography, 33 (1976), 32-44, 52.

9. Chatman, Story and Discourse, p. 162, defines interest point of view as the concerns of a character, if not actually his vision or thought.

10. Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1952), p. 31.

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” in Mosses from an Old Manse, ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, X (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), p. 75. Further references to this edition will be noted in the text.

12. “The Bedeviling of Young Goodman Brown,” Modern Language Quarterly, 19 (1958), 331.

13. “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” American Literature, 34 (1962), 350.

14. “Black Glove and Pink Ribbon: Hawthorne's Metonymic Symbols,” New England Quarterly, 42 (1969), 180.

15. “The Vision of Goodman Brown: A Source and Interpretation,” American Literature, 35 (1963), 222.

16. “The Problem of Faith in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 74 (1975), 375.

17. My terms “indirect” and “direct” correspond to Chatman's implicit (ironic) and explicit commentary respectively, p. 228.

18. For more complete definitions of “stasis statement,” “exposing,” “projecting,” and “events,” see Chatman, pp. 32-33. “Prolepsis” is Genette's term, p. 82.

19. I am using “paradigmatic” and “syntagmatic” in the usual Saussurean, structuralist way to mean, respectively, the reserve of meaning (particularly character traits and settings) available for the discourse's use and the sequence of actions occurring “linearly” throughout the story.

20. Joseph T. McCullen, “Young Goodman Brown: Presumption and Despair,” Discourse, 2 (1959), 149 and 156, n. 13, notices these contradictions but attributes them to Hawthorne's belief in the mixture of good and evil in people. On the other hand, without taking contradictory evidence into consideration, D. M. McKeithan, “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’: An Interpretation,” Modern Language Notes, 67 (1952), 96, asserts the goodness of the Salem villagers.

21. P. 83. L. Moffitt Cecil notes the correspondence between Brown's deluding eyesight and his faulty insight as typical of many of Hawthorne's characters in “Hawthorne's Optical Device,” American Quarterly, 15 (1963), 82-83.

22. Liebman, “The Reader,” pp. 161-162, points out many such instances of objective “facts” being actually only perceived by Brown who, for instance, “beheld the figure of a man,” “recognized a very pious and exemplary dame,” “heard the tramp of horses,” “recognized the voices,” “sees” a black cloud and a fire, thinks he sees his father and mother, and “beheld” Faith at the meeting. Many critics have, of course, discussed the famous pink ribbons, testing their reality or symbolic value. Leo Levy, “The Problem of Faith,” p. 377, argues for their reality on the basis of the “tangible evidence” that Brown seizes and beholds, but Hawthorne's grammatical constructions typically do not allow such positive identification. What Brown seizes is referred to as “it,” whose antecedent is the vague “something” that has fluttered down and which is seen only by Brown as a ribbon. Faith has her ribbons the next day. As for the symbolic significance of the ribbons, the ambiguity of the story has inspired much difference of opinion, as Levy points out, “The Problem,” p. 382.

23. “Teaching Roland Barthes' Method of Textual Analysis, with an Example from Hawthorne,” unpublished paper given at the Roland Barthes Special Session, Modern Language Association Convention, 1977.

24. Chatman's terminology, pp. 32-33, 53-56, is borrowed and adapted from Roland Barthes' as developed in his seminal article, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” Communications, 8 (1966), 1-27.

25. Taylor Stoehr, “‘Young Goodman Brown’ and Hawthorne's Theory of Mimesis,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23 (1969), 402-403, points out Hawthorne's use of these qualifying expressions in his tales and claims that about thirty of them appear in “Young Goodman Brown.” The purpose, according to Stoehr, is not to suggest allegorical meanings but rather to suspend “judgment on all apparent meanings, which are nonetheless offered as possibilities” (p. 403). This technique (and I agree) puts the reader in the same ambiguous situation as the characters but “with some additional hints” as to the solutions of the problem (p. 406). Stoehr, however, does not give any specific examples of these hints.

26. Misreadings by critics like Leo B. Levy, “The Problem of Faith,” p. 381, who on one hand seems to recognize the possibility of Brown's projection in hearing “a voice like Deacon Gookin's” but on the other claims that Gookin's words are not offered as “something Brown imagines,” may very well result from a neglect of point of view. The narrator emphasizes the subjective quality of Brown's perceptions by such qualifying words as “appeared,” “without discerning,” “were such a thing possible” (p. 81). Similarly, the other extreme of interpretation, like that of Paul J. Hurley, “Young Goodman Brown's ‘Heart of Darkness,’” American Literature, 37 (1966), 415, which denies the possibility of the narrator's attesting to the objective existence of the minister and the deacon, is equally mistaken in neglecting the ambiguity and the shifting of point of view.

27. Liebman, p. 159, notices other examples of the “seems” expression: the figure's “snakelike staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy” and the figure touches Goody Cloyse's neck “with what seemed the serpent's tail.” But Liebman claims that the comment about the couple's hesitation is Brown's, not the narrator's (p. 162), while identifying the following comments on the contents of the baptismal font to be “Hawthorne's” (p. 159), a contradiction of his principle of subjective action. As noted before, Liebman does not provide a clear basis for distinguishing between the narrator's and Brown's points of view.

28. Liebman, p. 163, also interprets the tempest as part of Brown's delusion.

29. Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, rev. ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1964), pp. 25-27, points out other contrasts like those between day and night, town and forest, red and black, serving as symbolic and stylistic balancing, as well as the thematic opposition between appearance and reality.

30. See Culler, p. 15.

31. The relation between patient and happening and agent and action is defined by Chatman, p. 32.

32. See A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 240. In unstable irony, “the author—insofar as we can discover him, and he is often very remote indeed—refuses to declare himself, however subtly, for any stable proposition.”