[In the following essay, Hollinger presents a rebuttal to James L. Williamson's 1981 essay (see above) on “Young Goodman Brown,” arguing that the narrator is not “of the devil's party,” but someone who exposes the hypocrisy of Puritan New England society.]

James L. Williamson's “‘Young Goodman Brown’: Hawthorne's ‘Devil In Manuscript’” identifies Hawthorne's tale as a “hell-fired” satire in which the speaker in the course of his telling the story “shows himself to be of the devil's party” and expresses a “demonic delight” in narrating a satanic tale, a delight that establishes him as the counterpart of the work's other devil figures, yet a close analysis of the narrative perspective in “Young Goodman Brown” shows its speaker to maintain a substantial distance from all of the characters in the story, and especially from those associated with the devil's party.¹ Williamson's argument centers on his identifying the speaker's method of telling his tale with the voices of the three major diabolical figures that Goodman Brown meets on his journey, the “traveler with the twisted staff,” Goody Cloyse, and the ministerial figure at the witches' meeting, but the speaker's attitude toward these figures is, on the contrary, so distant that Williamson's identification of a similarity in their voices appears extremely doubtful.

The speaker takes special pains to identify the figure with the twisted staff with specific personages: he bears a facial resemblance both to Young Goodman Brown and to Brown's grandfather, and has had intimate dealings not only with Brown's Puritan ancestors, but also with his contemporaries, deacons of the New England churches, members of its Great and General Court, and even the governor,² but never does the speaker in this long catalogue of identifications make any connection whatsoever between himself and this diabolical character; he maintains instead a careful distance, refusing even to assign this strange traveler a name, calling him only Brown's “fellow traveler,” “the other,” “he of the serpent,” “the elder person,” “the traveler with the twisted staff,” “the elder traveler,” and finally “the shape of Old Goodman Brown.” Clearly, the primary motive for this obfuscation cannot be to hide the satanic character of this figure, for it is all too apparent, but rather to accomplish the speaker's distancing from him. The only connections between the speaker and the “traveler with the twisted staff” are, as Williamson notes, their mockery of Young Goodman Brown's naïvety and their sarcastic reactions to his blind unrecognition of the evil within man, but Williamson fails to note the crucial difference between them, the very different aims served by their sarcasm and mockery: the “traveler with the twisted staff” hopes to convert Brown entirely to the cause of evil, while the speaker stands apart as an advocate of a balanced recognition of man's capacity for both good and evil. That both men adopt a sarcastic stance toward Brown does not seem evidence enough to connect their identities, and, in fact, the aims of their sarcasm seem to divorce them from each other. Williamson also connects the “traveler with the twisted staff” and the speaker in their “amused” attitude toward Brown, an attitude that leads “the traveler” to a “fit of irrepressible mirth” when Brown expresses his confidence in the righteousness of his ancestors (p. 78), yet this fit of mirth, or of “boisterous laughter” as Williamson calls it,³ does not seem at all characteristic of the speaker, who may be sarcastic, condescending, and mocking of Brown, but never seems to find his situation in the least mirthful.

The connection that Williamson makes between the speaker and the second diabolical figure in the tale, Goody Cloyse, is also unconvincing in that it is based solely on the notion that Cloyse and the speaker are united in their tendencies to gossip. When Goody Cloyse converses with the “traveler with the twisted staff,” she identifies him as “in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is” (p. 79), the meaning of gossip in this context being ambiguous and open to two interpretations: either a relayer of sensational and personal rumor in the modern sense of the word or an old friend or crony in the archaic sense. Goody Cloyse's use of the personal pronoun “my” would seem to make the archaic usage more likely, but Williamson proposes that the modern meaning is suggested and that the speaker demonstrates similar tendencies to gossip in his description of the witches' meeting.⁴ His saying that “some affirm that the lady of the governor was there” and his calling Martha Carrier “a rampant hag” represent, according to Williamson, two instances in which the speaker descends to the level of gossip and shows himself similar in character to Goody Cloyse, but these two phrases can, in fact, be interpreted otherwise to refute this imputation (pp. 87, 86).⁵ The indirect reference to the governor's wife can be seen as the speaker's attempt to cast doubt, as he does so often in the narrative, on the certainty that events actually happened as Brown perceived them and to exercise his sarcasm at the expense of Puritan hypocrisy by pretending to doubt that this hypocrisy could extend even to the most respected members of New England society, and the use of the term “rampant hag” in regard to Martha Carrier seems intended not as a piece of village gossip, but to add to the speaker's portrait of the witches' meeting as a union in satanism of both the apparently evil and the seemingly good, the “rampant hag” Martha Carrier and “that pious teacher of the catechism” Goody Cloyse coming together to help the proselytes in evil to the “canopy of fire.” But the significant distinguishing features of Goody Cloyse's voice, as Williamson does note, are her colloquial, folksy speech and her somewhat quarrelsome, yet mirthful attitude toward “his worship,” the “traveler with the twisted staff,”⁶ yet these qualities of voice, as Williamson does not point out, are in no way duplicated in the tone of the speaker who is never colloquial, quarrelsome, or mirthful.

The third satanic figure, the Puritan divine who leads the congregation of witches and sets out to initiate Young Goodman Brown and Faith into it, is quite rightly identified by Williamson as assuming a “sermonic form of speech,” and this tone, according to Williamson, is duplicated in the speaker's mock-reverential tone in such phrases as: “With reverence be it spoken …” and “the sacred truths of our religion” and to his moralistic insertions such as: “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man” (pp. 86, 89, 84).⁷ The difference, however, is between reverence and mock-reverence: the Puritan divine as leader of the witches' meeting uses a tone of reverential sermonizing that is never meant by him as sarcastic mockery, while the speaker's reverential and moralistic phrases seem, on the other hand, to be used for this purpose.

There are indications in the story not only that the speaker's voice is not intended to be associated with that of the diabolical figures, but also that he wishes to remain very distant from them. His initial narrative perspective is that of Young Goodman Brown, who is the first figure introduced, the character through whom Faith's parting words and the meetings with the diabolical figures are perceived, and the comrade with whom the speaker undertakes the journey into the gloomy forest. If the speaker identified with the evil characters in the tale, it would seem at least once he would slip into their consciousness to record their perceptions of events, but this never occurs. The encounters with the “traveler with the twisted staff,” Goody Cloyse, the minister and Deacon Gookin, and the experiences of the witches' meeting are all perceived through Brown's consciousness and only his internal reactions to them are described, a particularly telling scene occurring when Brown leaves the “traveler with the twisted staff” to avoid an encounter with Goody Cloyse. The speaker follows Brown into the trees to observe the meeting from this distant perspective rather than remain with his diabolical figures; this abandonment of evil to follow naïve virtue seems further to call into question the possibility of the speaker's identification with this evil. A second scene revealing the speaker's attitude toward evil involves Brown's perception of a dark cloud completely blackening the sky overhead as he moves farther into the forest's gloom, causing him to doubt that there is even a heaven above. At this point, the speaker breaks off from Brown's perspective to insist that “yet there was the blue arch and the stars brightening in it … the blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead” (p. 82). The speaker now begins slowly to divorce himself more and more from Brown's perspective as Brown becomes so shocked and disillusioned by his initiation into evil that he is unable to see the good that is also within man, as the blue sky is behind the dark cloud just overhead. To the speaker, Brown's incapacity to view man as both good and evil makes the rest of his life a nightmare and “his dying hour” one of “doom” (p. 90). Far from being of the devil's party, the speaker in “Young Goodman Brown” is a member of the party of man believing in his enormous capacity for both good and evil, a capacity that the speaker believes the hypocrisy of Puritan New England made it impossible for Goodman Brown to accept, or even to understand.

Notes

1. James L. Williamson, “‘Young Goodman Brown’: Hawthorne's Devil in Manuscript,” Studies in Short Fiction, 18 (Spring 1981), 155-162.

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, eds. William Charvat et al. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1962), pp. 76-77, 79. All further citations from the tale are to this edition and will be identified parenthetically in the text.

3. Williamson, p. 161.

4. Williamson, p. 159.

5. Williamson, p. 159.

6. Williamson, pp. 158-159.

7. Williamson, p. 160.