[In the following essay, Easterly discusses Hawthorne's use of lachrymal, or tear, imagery in “Young Goodman Brown,” emphasizing Brown's inability to cry either out of sorrow for others or in repentance for his own sins.]

“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband. “Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One!”

Whether Faith obeyed, he knew not. Hardly had he spoken, when he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind, which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the rock and felt it chill and damp, while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.

(Hawthorne [“Young Goodman Brown”] 88)

Thus ends the crucial scene in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of “Young Goodman Brown,” the story of a Puritan lad who leaves his bride of three months to secretly watch a witches' Sabbath in the deep forest outside Salem village. In so doing, he willfully betrays his commitment to his wife, the moral code of his society, and the teachings of his religion. The experience of this one night in the forest changes Goodman Brown for the rest of his life, for it poisons his relationship with his wife, isolates him from his neighbors, and destroys his ability to worship God. Whether dream or reality, one wild night is the turning point of Brown's existence; afterward he is “a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” and, when he dies, “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone” (90).

Literary critics have interpreted the significance of Goodman Brown's experience in many fashions—allegorical, moral, philosophical, and psychological. However, there is an intriguing absence of any reference to the last line of the Sabbath scene to explain Hawthorne's characterization of the young Puritan, despite the fact that Hawthorne signals the importance of the cold drops of dew in a periodic sentence. In essence, Hawthorne here carefully delineates the image of a young man who has faced and failed a critical test of moral and spiritual maturity.

Young Goodman Brown, leaning against the cold rock after the witch-meeting vanishes, is reproached by his creator because he shows no compassion for the weaknesses he sees in others, no remorse for his own sin, and no sorrow for his loss of faith. The one action that would demonstrate such deep and redemptive human feelings does not take place. Goodman Brown does not weep. Therefore, Hawthorne quietly and gently sprinkles “the coldest dew” on his cheek to represent the absence of tears.

This lack of tears, the outward sign of an inward reality, posits the absence of the innate love and humility that would have made possible Brown's moral and spiritual progression. A meticulous artist and a master of symbolism, Hawthorne uses the twig and dewdrops deliberately. Drops of water on a man's cheek can only suggest tears.

The hanging twig that sprinkles the drops of water on Goodman Brown's face calls to mind a picture of the beadle perched on a high stool in the back of a Puritan meeting house, holding two long switches. According to legend, one switch had a feather attached to the end and the other a stone or burr. If a lady fell asleep during the long service, the beadle would awaken her by tickling her face with the feather, but any gentleman inclined to drowse or small boys inclined to mischief knew that the stone hung over their heads like the bait on a long fishing rod and that their recall to propriety would not be so gentle. Likewise, Goodman Brown is awakened to reality from his dream or vision by a “hanging twig” that had been burning during the witch meeting but now scatters cold dew on his cheek. Like the beadle's switch, a twig from on high is the vehicle for bringing to Brown's face the reminder of what would be correct behavior and attitude for a man in this situation. He should be weeping, but he is not.

The clear, cold drops of dew are a direct contrast to the flaming blood-like liquid with which the Satanic figure is about to baptize Faith and Goodman Brown when the young man's cry, “Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One!” (88), interrupts the ceremony. The words—which trigger the disappearance of the witch-meeting—and the immediate sprinkling of dew on Goodman Brown's cheek suggest that the cold water is also a baptism, a sign of salvation, grace, and renewal. This interpretation would then imply that since Brown alone has resisted Satan, he would justly find his life intolerable in Salem, where all of those whom he has revered have betrayed his confidence in their faith. If the drops of water are a sign of blessing, then Goodman Brown's vision would seem to have been a true one, and he is consigned to live in the horror of being the one good man in a village of witches whose true maleficence is cloaked in piety. However, the placement and form of the water drops signify that they are not a reminder of Christian grace. In the story the devil's mark of baptism was to be laid on the communicants' foreheads as a mockery of the Christian sacrament. In contrast, the drops of dew that fall on Brown's cheek do not signify Christian baptism because this rite, by the oldest tradition, involves the forehead and flowing water rather than sprinkled water.

Instead, Hawthorne deliberately and ingenuously uses the image of dewdrops, suggestive of an uncomfortable, chilling dampness from the earth (rather than, for example, raindrops, which are associated with cleansing, warmth, and heaven), to reprove Goodman Brown. The Puritan has just seen the sinfulness of his neighbors and friends clearly exposed, and has become acutely aware of the evil in his own heart as the unholy celebration arouses in him a feeling of “loathful brotherhood” with the fiend worshipers. However, not only does Brown fail to display the pity indicative of a sense of moral maturity in regard to the weakness and depravity of others, he likewise shows no regret for his own wickedness, a response that would start him on the path to spiritual maturity. The spiritual implications of Brown's failure are emphasized by Hawthorne's presenting the young man's dilemma in the context of a witches' meeting, and Brown's assimilation of the Satanic figure's assertion that mankind is predominately wicked indicates his lack of faith in the power of God to overcome evil. On a moral level, Brown's acceptance of others as they are—imperfect and subject to temptation—would have made a mature adulthood and productive and healthy relationships with others possible. But his lack of remorse and compassion, as symbolized by the absence of tears, condemns him to an anguished life that is spiritually and emotionally desiccated. The drops that Hawthorne places on Brown's cheek are of “the coldest dew,” devastating in their connotation, for they represent the coldness of a soul that is dying, in contrast to the regenerative warmth of true tears and love.

Young Goodman Brown's inability to cry after the shock of the witches' meeting would be a strong argument for those who typecast the tale as an “initiation story” in which the protagonist fails to achieve adulthood. As psychologists Carol Gilligan and John Murphy state in “Development from Adolescence to Adulthood”:

While formal logic and principles of justice can release adolescent judgment from the binding constraints of a conventional mode of moral reasoning, the choices that arise in adulthood impose a new context for moral decision … an expanded ethic that encompasses compassion, tolerance, and respect.

(410)

Using these criteria, Goodman Brown demonstrates none of the characteristics of the adult “expanded ethic.” He shows no compassion for the sinfulness he sees in others (and which he shares), no tolerance for others' imperfections, and no respect for their attempts at faithful lives. Compassion is the most important of these characteristics because it could engender the other two emotions, and it is Brown's lack of compassion that Hawthorne wishes to emphasize in the story. Whether one classifies the young man's experience at the witches' Sabbath as a failed initiation into adulthood or as simply the critical moment in his moral and spiritual growth, Hawthorne's portrayal of a young Puritan of immature faith and simplistic morality is rendered more complete by the realization that Brown is a man who does not weep.

Human tears are an emotional response, and Hawthorne's allusion to the lack of tears underscores Brown's emotional barrenness. Critical analyses have hitherto focused primarily on Brown's faulty or immature moral reasoning, arguing that the Puritan fails the test of the Sabbath because he fails to reason on a mature moral level, either because of the legalism of Puritan doctrine or because of his refusal to admit his own sinfulness (Frank 209, Folsom 32, Fogle 23, Stubbs 73). Yet Hawthorne clearly indicates that Brown also destroys his chance to progress morally and spiritually because of his inability to respond intuitively to the shock of the experience with mature, positive emotions that would have enabled him to deal with the vision of evil in his neighbors as well as with the knowledge of his own wickedness. Goodman Brown does not weep tears of deep sorrow for others because he cannot love or forgive them. He does not weep for his own sins because he lacks a deeply felt faith, which tears of contrition—arising from a broken spirit sensitive to the baseness of sin and to God's loving mercy and grace—would signify.

Hawthorne emphasizes Brown's lack of positive emotions and implies his regression into emotional sterility by the cold, damp forest, which is in dramatic contrast to the description of the witches' meeting, where the trembling Puritan's horror is evoked by the blasphemy of the unholy worship and the loathsome kinship he feels with the congregation. The emotional prose intensifies with the dreadful, confused sounds of the fiends' hymn and the images of blazing fire, blood, and smoke as Brown becomes aware of the power of evil and the sinful nature of everyone whom he respects. When the vision disappears at Brown's anguished cry to Faith, the suddenly changed scenery of the next paragraph deliberately corresponds to young Brown's emotional state. Words like “solitude,” “rock,” “chill,” “damp,” and “coldest” suggest the absence or denial of positive feelings, which Brown demonstrates immediately afterward. The townspeople he encounters on his return from the witches' meeting are involved in good works—preparing a sermon, praying, catechizing a child—yet he rejects them, and when his young wife greets him with joy and affection, he spurns her. This heartlessness is the pattern for the rest of Brown's life, and Hawthorne, who was aware of the complexity and mystery of human nature, completes his portrait of a young man whose life is blighted in a single night by revealing in the crucial paragraph through chilly rock and coldest dew that young Goodman Brown's moral and spiritual disaster is also due to an inappropriate emotional response at the critical moment.

In conclusion, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the master of symbolism and suggestion, softly sprinkles cold tears on the cheek of young Goodman Brown. This lachrymal image, so delicately wrought, is the key to interpreting the young Puritan's failure to achieve moral and spiritual maturity. Brown cannot reconcile the conflict caused by his legalistic evaluation of others, nor can he transcend this moral dilemma by showing compassion and remorse. In final irony, Hawthorne tells us that the man who sheds no tears lives the rest of his life a “sad” man, whose “dying hour was gloom” (90).

Works Cited

Fogle, Richard Harter. Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1964.

Folsom, James K. Man's Accidents and God's Purpose: Multiplicity in Hawthorne's Fiction. New Haven: College & UP, 1963.

Frank, Neal. Hawthorne's Early Tales: A Critical Study. Durham: Duke UP, 1972.

Gilligan, Carol, and John Michael Murphy. “Development From Adolescence to Adulthood: The Philosopher and the Dilemma of the Fact.” Readings in Developmental Psychology, 2nd ed. Ed. Judith Krieger Gardner. Boston: Little, 1982. 400-12.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” Mosses from an Old Manse. Ohio State UP, 1974. 74-90.

Stubbs, John Caldwell. The Pursuit of Form: A Study of Hawthorne and the Romance. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1970.