[In the following essay, Williamson suggests that Hawthorne exhibits a gleeful, mocking narrative persona in “Young Goodman Brown” in order to expose pretensions about life and literature.]

When Hawthorne commented on the vocation of authorship, he was often drawn to analogies between writing and damnation. “… authors,” he wrote with tongue-in-cheek in 1821, “are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them.”¹ The pun is on “devil,” which can mean a literary hack; and the meaning is clear: to write conventionally and without integrity is to damn oneself as a writer, even at the cost of popularity and recognition. “… America is now wholly given over to a d[amne]d mob of scribbling women,” Hawthorne wrote in 1855, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.”² Yet, going to the devil, in another context, was the highest form of praise Hawthorne could bestow on a fellow author. “The woman writes as if the Devil was in her,” he commented upon reading Sara P. Willis's Ruth Hall, “and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading. Generally women write like emasculated men … ; but when they throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were,—then their books are sure to possess character and value.”³ To write as though possessed in this sense meant to penetrate beneath social convention and to speak in an authentic, potent voice. Such a descent could be liberating (for writer and reader), as well as damning in a personal and professional sense. For when Hawthorne described The Scarlet Letter as “positively a h[el]l-f[ire]d story,” he bestowed upon his Romance his highest praise and severest criticism. A hell-fired story was “powerfully written,” but, for that reason, unlikely to “appeal to the broadest class of sympathies,” nor to “obtain a very wide popularity.”⁴ To write as though possessed from this perspective was to contend with social and literary conventions (as the root meaning of “Satan” is “adversary”), and a writer who challenged such conventions could expect to alienate part of the popular reading audience.

The personal cost of going to the devil as a writer was earliest dramatized in the figure of Oberon, the artist hero of “The Devil in Manuscript,” a burlesque on the conditions of authorship in America in the 1830's. Published in the New-England Magazine seven months following the appearance of “Young Goodman Brown,” the sketch provides an excellent gloss on that tale. For Oberon has given himself to the devil; that is, his vocation has been dedicated to creating in fiction “‘the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written records of witchcraft.’” “‘You remember,’” he tells his companion, “‘how the hellish thing used to suck away the happiness of those who, by a simple concession that seemed almost innocent, subjected themselves to his power. Just so my peace is gone, and all by these accursed manuscripts.’” Just so Goodman Brown's innocent venture into the devil's woods and simple concessions to the devil's arguments will end in his permanent loss of peace and happiness. And just so will Brown come to find himself trapped in a world of uncertainties and spectral appearances. “‘I am surrounding myself with shadows,’” laments Oberon, “‘which bewilder me, by aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude—a solitude in the midst of men—where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done all this.’” But Oberon, unlike Brown, is finally of the devil's party. His tale concludes not with death and gloom, but with fire and triumph, as the ashes from his burning manuscripts escape from the chimney to set the town ablaze. “‘My tales!’” he cries. “‘The chimney! The roof! The Fiend has gone forth by night, and startled thousands in fear and wonder from their beds! Here I stand—a triumphant author! Huzza! Huzza! My brain has set the town on fire!’” Oberon's final words affirm the demonic, that is, destructive but liberating aspects of his art as it awakens his neighbors from their accustomed slumbers to “fear and wonder.” Although Brown lacks the ironic, cosmopolitan perspective of the artist, and although he fears the wrath of an Old Testament God throughout his life of gloom, he nonetheless suffers the fate of the romantic writer: a damnation that becomes a salvation (however unorthodox). To examine “Young Goodman Brown” from this point of view, however, we must turn from Brown for a moment to focus on the speaker of the tale, remembering Hawthorne's analogies between writer and devil, as well as between writing and damnation. As we shall see, the devil figures who appear to Brown in the woods will each bear a certain resemblance to the speaker of the tale, or to those characteristics of the speaker dramatized in his voice. The speaker, that is, will show himself to be of the devil's party, and Brown's experience in the woods will come to represent the experience of art, of reading the tale “Young Goodman Brown.”⁵

II

At a climactic moment, as he is about to be baptized into the devil's fold, Goodman Brown calls upon Faith to “‘Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One!’” Yet in the course of the tale, Brown encounters not one, but three “wicked ones,” each with a peculiar character and distinct voice. The first of these devils presents himself as a casual, urbane individual: “simply clad” and “as simple in manner too,” but possessing “an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and would not have felt abashed at the governor's dinner-table, or in King William's court. …” Adept at the art of understatement, this devil addresses Brown in an amused, patronizing tone as he mimics Brown's own naive pretensions and self-righteousness. Witness the following dialogue:

“My father never went into the woods on such an errand, [exclaimed Brown] nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good Christians, since the days of the martyrs. 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. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you, for their sake”

(X, 76-77).⁶

This devil subverts Brown's sentimental view of his ancestral past in manner as well as matter; for linked with the evidence of those ancestors' sins is a satiric, parodic mode of expression that reduces Brown's arguments to a child's recitations. It will be no accident that the second devil figure Brown witnesses will appear in the form of the old woman who taught him his catechism; but just as telling is the first devil's striking resemblance to both Brown's father and grandfather.⁷ In appearance, as well as theme and tone, this devil mocks Brown's words.

The speaker, too, shows these devilish characteristics; for he can be quite condescending and sarcastic toward his bewildered hero. For example, Brown begins his night experience with the following sentiment about Faith: “‘Well; she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night, I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven.’” “With this excellent resolve for the future,” responds the speaker in a tone that parodies Brown's naive presumptuousness, “Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose.” And when, deep within the dark woods, Brown sits down and refuses to go on with the devil, the speaker makes the following damning comment:

The young man sat a few moments, by the road-side, applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the minister, in his morning-walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his, that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations …

(X, 80-81).

Like the urbane devil, the speaker mocks Brown in Brown's own words. The consequence of this technique is a sustained tone of satire in the tale. To cite another example, consider how the speaker describes Brown's initial reactions to the gathering of devils and witches in the woods:

Either the sudden gleams of light, flashing over the obscure field, bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church-members of Salem village, famous for their especial sanctity. … But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints

(X, 85).

Here the speaker combines his omniscient point of view that allows him to describe Brown's feelings about events with a viewpoint that imitates Brown's literal process of observation. His “either … or” device dramatizes Brown's dilemma as a participant in the events of the tale; but, at the same time, his melodramatic, almost mawkish sentiments are satiric comments on Brown's moral priggishness: his naive desire to see clear-cut divisions in human experience.

The second devilish figure, a boisterous old hag named Goody Cloyse, appears to Brown in the shape of the “very pious and exemplary dame” and “Christian woman,” who we are told, “had taught him his catechism.” Colloquial in speech, folksy, and something of a gossip (in the nineteenth as well as the seventeenth century meaning of the word) and quarreler, she overflows with a mirthful spirit and mocking wit. The scene in which she appears commences with a pun and verges upon farce as it develops:

“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 is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. But—would your worship believe it?—my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen, as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all anointed with the juice of smallage and cinque-foil and wolfs-bane—”

“Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” said the shape of old Goodman Brown.

“Ah, your worship knows the receipt,” cried the old lady, cackling aloud. “So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me, there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night …”

(X, 79).

The old hag's opening exclamation works as an ironic counter to Brown's repeated invocations of “Faith”; indeed, the pervasive tone of her remarks mocks Brown's sentimental expectations of how “pious” older women should conduct themselves, while retaining the childish diction associated with religious persons in their dotage. If the first devil acts as her foil on this occasion, then the speaker participates in the jesting as well, repeatedly referring to her as the “pious old lady” and “good dame” in blatantly ironic contexts and mimicking Brown's point of view when he introduces her as “mumbling some indistinct words, a prayer, doubtless. …” Later at the witch meeting, the speaker will become something of a gossip himself. “Some affirm,” he tells us as though he were repeating a rumor, “that the lady of the governor was there. At least, there were high dames well known to her. …” And, when the shape of Martha Carrier appears, he gives vent to a sudden outburst of devilish spite: “A rampant hag was she!”

Going to the devil, in “Young Goodman Brown,” means not just encountering certain unsettling insights into the terrible and the grotesque in human experience, but also confronting a mocking, satiric attitude toward such revelations. The devils who haunt Brown's woods know how to laugh; and there is a kernel of devilish wisdom in the first figure's words to Brown during “a fit of irrepressible mirth”: “‘Ha!ha!ha!’ shouted he, again and again; then composing himself, ‘Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but pr’y thee, don’t kill me with laughing!’” Could Brown learn to laugh, that is, could he learn to take an ironic view toward his experience in the Salem woods, then he might well begin to exorcise his tormenting devils. He will never be able to dismiss their words, but he might learn to live with them. Perhaps the best commentary on this aspect of the tale is to be found in a passage written two decades later in The Scarlet Letter. Commenting on Dimmesdale's vigils before the looking glass, in which “diabolic shapes” grin and mock at the bewildered minister and “spectral thoughts” assume life-like form, the speaker of the Romance points out that, although such fantasies are “the truest and most substantial things” to Dimmesdale, and although their effect is to steal “the pith and substance out of whatever realities” surround him, nevertheless: “Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of gayety, there would have been no such man!” (I, 145-146). Certainly in both “Young Goodman Brown” and The Scarlet Letter, the speaker is on hand to show the reader that such laughter is possible; indeed, that an amused, ironic attitude toward the darker aspects of human experience is an accommodation of art to the recognition of the perverse and the demonic.

The third devil figure, who appears to Brown at the witches' meeting, is more grave and formal than his predecessors, though he shares their disposition for mocking wit. “With reverence be it spoken,” the speaker tells us, “the figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the New-England churches.” And this devil addresses Brown “in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad, with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race.” Nonetheless, the incongruity between dark matter and light, ironic manner is apparent in his sermonic form of speech.⁸

“There … are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet, here are they all, in my worshipping assembly! This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widow's weeds, has given her husband a drink at bed-time, and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers' wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet ones!—have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an infant's funeral …”

(X, 87).

The speaker, too, affects a reflective, mock-reverential pose. His appeal to “the sacred truths of our religion” at the conclusion of the tale, as well as such asides to the reader as: “With reverence be it spoken …” (cited above), express a mock-pious attitude; but the speaker can also affect a graver, moralistic tone. “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous,” he tells us as, maddened with despair, Brown rushes through the forest, “than when he rages in the breast of man.” Like the devils in the tale, the speaker is something of a chameleon, assuming now an amused, satiric tone of voice, now a graver, moralistic seriousness.

III

The speaker in “Young Goodman Brown” bears, then, a striking resemblance to the devil figures in the tale. He shares with them an ironic, parodic mode that ranges from boisterous laughter, to subtle, amused satire, to mock-reverential reflectiveness. In manner, as well as matter, the devils subvert Brown's naive notions; and the speaker is on hand to support their designs. Indeed, the speaker's mocking attitude is directed not just toward Brown, but toward the conventions of Romance as well. “And Faith, as the wife was aptly named …,” he comments in the opening lines of the tale, countering his allegoric appeal with an amused detachment toward the very process of allegory. “But the only thing about him, that could be fixed upon as remarkable,” he tells his reader when introducing the first devil figure, “was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself, like a living serpent. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.” Throughout the tale the speaker will present his reader traditional emblems like the serpentine staff, but will do so in a teasing manner. Affecting a naive pose, so that he appears an inquisitive, unsophisticated spectator of events, he mimics Brown's perspective. Yet his commonsense observations have a sarcastic resonance to them, reinforced by such ironic qualifiers as “of course,” “doubtless,” “in truth,” and “perhaps.” Like the devil figures in the tale, the speaker feigns a Brown-like innocence as he satirically mocks such credulity.

Brown's complacent faith in saintly ancestors and angelic wives, as well as a moral order that reflects a clear-cut segregation between good and evil, makes him an inviting target for the devils' satire. Behind this attack on Brown lies Hawthorne's own burlesque on certain conventions of authorship in the 1830's: the attitude, for example, that historical romance should suppress those aspects of the past which, in Rufus Choate's words, “chills, shames, disgusts us,” while accommodating “the show of things to the desires and needs of the immortal, moral nature,”⁹ and, for another example, the cult of “Heaven, Home, and Mother”¹⁰ preached by the scribbling women Hawthorne damned in 1855. For Brown acts as a determined sentimentalist throughout his adventure, fleeing from the unpleasant aspects of his past and his home into pat, reassuring morals whenever he can. The opening scene of the tale dramatizes this pattern well.

“Dearest heart,” whispered [Faith], softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to [Brown's] ear, “pr’y thee, put off your journey until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she’s afeard of herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year!”

“My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “of all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee. … What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already, and we but three months married!”

“Then, God bless you!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons, “and may you find all well when you come back.”

“Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee”

(X, 74-75).

Though Faith's manner is coy and playful, her words reveal a deeper, more unsettling aspect of her character. A “lone woman,” “troubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she’s afeard of herself, sometimes,” she seems to want Brown to remain at home to protect her from experiencing facets of herself with which she is uncomfortable. Her parting words to her husband show a troubled resignation and sound more like a challenge than a blessing. Brown's responses show his reluctance to scrutinize his wife's troubled words and puzzling tone. In leaving behind “a blessed angel on earth” for a flirtation with evil in the night woods, Brown seems to hope to evade a problematic moment in his marriage; but in the woods he will be forced to confront unpleasant aspects of his wife and himself as he encounters the dark words and unsettling visions of the devils. Behind these mocking antagonists stands the skeptical figure of the author's persona, mocking such pretensions about life and literature. This “devil in manuscript,” like his counterparts in the tale, combines a tragic perspective with a satiric wit, converting “gloom” into demonic delight: the delight of writing “hell-fired” satires like “Young Goodman Brown.”

Notes

1. From a letter dated 13 March 1821 from Hawthorne to his mother. See Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife; A Biography (Boston: Osgood, 1885), I, 108.

2. From a letter dated January, 1855, from Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor. See Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1913), p. 141.

3. Hawthorne and His Publisher, p. 142, from a letter from Hawthorne to Ticknor dated February, 1855.

4. From a letter dated 4 February 1850 from Hawthorne to Horatio Bridge. See Bridge, Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Harper, 1893), pp. 111-112.

5. The following studies of “Young Goodman Brown” have most influenced this approach to the tale. Curtis Dahl's “The Devil is a Wise One,” Cithara, 6 (May 1967), 52-58, makes the well-taken point that the devil can often be a spokesman in Hawthorne's tales for the author's own subtle and paradoxical ideas. R. H. Fogle's two studies of the tale discuss its “light and idealizing” tone, as well as its elements of understatement and parody. See “Ambiguity and Clarity in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” New England Quarterly, 18 (December 1945), 448-465, and “Weird Mockery: An Element of Hawthorne's Style,” Style, 2 (Fall 1968), 191-202. Sheldon W. Liebman contributes to the discussion of Hawthorne's narrative mode in “The Reader in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1975 (Englewood, Co.: Microcard Editions, 1975), 156-169. The reader, he finds, is made to be the central character of the story, and Hawthorne's narrative technique works to put him in Brown's place. Indirect but nonetheless important sources for this discussion are Taylor Stoehr's “‘Young Goodman Brown’ and Hawthorne's Theory of Mimesis,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23 (March 1969), 393-412, and Darrel Abel's “Black Glove and Pink Ribbon: Hawthorne's Metonymic Symbols,” New England Quarterly, 42 (June 1969), 163-180. For writers like Hawthorne, writes Stoehr, “correspondences of dream and reality are to a great extent problems of verbal imagination, referential language, and literary mimesis.” The tale, from this perspective, is “peculiarly about itself, about the nature of belief in imagined realities, and about the status of such realities.”

6. All quotations from Hawthorne's fiction are from The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, eds. William Charvat et al. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1962-). References to longer passages are identified by volume and page numbers.

7. “Still, they might have been taken for father and son,” the speaker tells us, referring to the first devil figure and Brown. Later, a witch in the shape of the woman who taught Brown his catechism will compare this devil to “the very image of … Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is.”

8. Fogle makes the following comment on this passage: “The difference between matter and manner is great, considering that the matter is lust, murder most foul, and possibly abortion. There is a ceremonious gallantry, along with an indulgent chiding, in ‘fair damsels—blush not, sweet ones.’ Girls will be girls, and a very entertaining circumstance it is, too.” See “Weird Mockery: An Element of Hawthorne's Style,” p. 199.

9. Quoted from extracts of Rufus Choate's 1833 oration, “The Importance of Illustrating New-England History by a Series of Romances Like the Waverly Novels,” reprinted in Neal Frank Doubleday's Hawthorne's Early Tales, A Critical Study (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1972), p. 25. See especially Doubleday's discussion of literary theory and Hawthorne's practice in the “Age of Scott,” pp. 18-26.

10. See Herbert Ross Brown's discussion of Richardson and the “triumph of the novel” in America in The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (New York: Pageant Books, 1940), pp. 3-51.