SOURCE: “Visible Sanctity and Specter Evidence: The Moral World of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” in Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. 110, October, 1974, pp. 259-99.

[In the following essay, Colacurcio examines “Young Goodman Brown” in the context of Puritan theology, faith, and “spectral evidence” of witchcraft and the devil. Colacurcio suggests that Hawthorne uses his story to demonstrate “that witchcraft ‘ended’ the Puritan world”.]

Any seriously “complete” interpretation of Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” must somehow take account of David Levin's rather exact description of Brown's experience in the actual language of 1692. It may be possible to disagree with his final assertion that the “literal” dimension of “Young Goodman Brown” is “social,” condemning “that graceless perversion of true Calvinism which, in universal suspicion, actually led a community to the unjust destruction of twenty men and women”; but it seems impossible to deny that “spectral evidence” is, in some sense, the central issue of the tale. The attempt to “answer” him has proved unproductive; and it is now possible to see that all the early readings which argued that Brown's desperate conclusions might not be fully justified by the nature of his evidence were at least implicitly pointing out one central issue: namely, the inadvisability of accepting the Devil's word about the constitution and ordering of the invisible world.¹

This is not to imply that psychoanalytic, even purely Freudian, acumen is out of place in the criticism of the tale. The author of a casebook on “Young Goodman Brown,” though obviously committed to a theological reading, can nevertheless show (with charts) a deliberately contrived and consistently maintained sexual “level” of allegory everywhere in the tale; thus, presumably, are freshmen persuaded that the moralist need be neither discomfited nor disgusted by the “impudent knowingness” of Frederick Crews.

But one need not choose tendentious examples to make the point. A recent study of Hawthorne's tale in relation to a Deodat Lawson pamphlet entitled Christ's Fidelity cannot let its criticism rest at this level of probable if curious historic encounter. Anxious lest he be misunderstood to think that Hawthorne's story is to be conceived chiefly as an answer to Lawson, or that Hawthorne writes only about the fixities and definites of a rather parochial (even tribalist) group of misguided religious zealots, the author feels the need to end with a ringing declaration of Hawthorne's psychological generality: “With his genius for insight and technique, Hawthorne thus created a new and timeless drama about the distortions of the human mind.” And even Levin himself, whose commitment to the “Defense of Historical Literature” is perfectly unambiguous, ends on a similar note: the important thing about Hawthorne is the way he worked a “narrow range of types and subjects” to discover a “remarkable range of insights into human experience.”²

What makes these gestures sympathetic is our perception of how accurately the critics in question have sensed the prejudices of their entrenched academic audience. That audience does not exactly cling to The Interpretation of Dreams as part of the canon of Revelation; but it does, very emphatically, believe that literature is more philosophically general than history. And, having substituted psychology for ontology as the first philosophy, its way of being philosophical is to affirm a commitment to abstractions such as “the human mind” or “human experience.” If Freud turns out to have given us the ultimate structures, well, so be it. We’d much prefer the softer, not-quite-consistent determination of an Erik Erikson. Better still would be our own random gleanings from our favorite humanist authors, seriatim and ad hoc. But we can face the truth, so long as it’s a General Truth. We are, apparently, willing to take our Platonism wherever we can find it.

Now granting the inevitability of all this, the point is still that “timeless” psychoanalytic readings of “Young Goodman Brown” do not circumvent the problems of 1692: even if we choose to say that the devil's forest sideshow is only a fantasy conjured up out of Brown's own sexually troubled psyche (so that he is the victim of his own devil), we are still involved in what Hawthorne always thought of as the “spectral regions” of the “haunted mind.” To put the case quite bluntly: not only are the proven Puritan sources of the tale obsessed with the technical implications of spectral evidence, which wracked the official conscience of latter-day Puritanism like almost no other; not only is specter evidence the explicit vehicle of the tale, determining the ultimate psychological meaning as surely as a “red, red rose” determines the aspect under which “my love” can be known; but further, from “Alice Doane” straight through his unfinished romances Hawthorne allowed the Puritan language of the “invisible world” to determine his vocabulary and set the limits to his own psychological investigations. In short, it would have taken a singularly obtuse reading of Cotton and Increase Mather (not to mention Deodat Lawson) to have missed either the specific or the general import of their actual problem; or a singularly dilettantish reading to preserve dozens of minute details while ignoring their significance; or a singularly self-involved reading to reduce the whole affair to a version of his own oedipal anxieties.³

In fact, Hawthorne's story preserves the central Puritan issue of spectral evidence in an even larger way than Professor Levin has suggested. Significantly, “Young Goodman Brown” is not “about” the Salem Village trials any more than “The Gentle Boy” is “about” the judicial murder of Quaker protesters in 1659. Although the tale refers to certain non-diabolical personages whose names figure in the records of 1692, there is nothing about witch hunts in the tale: the unhappy Goodman Brown simply lives out his faithless life in quiet and gloomy desperation; there is no suggestion that he was ever to know the clash of courtroom controversy. We can say, if we wish, that the action takes place “near Salem Village, probably in 1692,” but there is no need to insist on this sort of pseudo-historicity.⁴ Far more significant, as we shall see, is the simple fact that Goodman Brown is a third-generation Puritan. At issue, accordingly, is far more than that one infamous outbreak of “universal suspicion,” though Hawthorne's mature reflections in “Main Street” (1849) make it clear that the gothic terror of “Alice Doane's Appeal” was not mere managed melodrama; that Hawthorne continued to feel real horror when he thought of that outbreak. In “Young Goodman Brown” an important habit of the Puritan mind is on trial: even as Hawthorne revises “Alice Doane's Appeal” he discovers that the problem of how to tell a witch is distressingly similar to the radically Puritan problem of how to tell a saint.⁵

Although the episode of 1692 stood out like an ugly blot on the historical page, Hawthorne could not view it as an isolated event, separate from the whole character of Puritan moral experience. As with the Quaker persecutions, customary moral assumptions might not always produce their most proper psychological effects; but it was not altogether surprising if occasionally they did. They did, Hawthorne felt, in the actual events of 1692, and they do in the fictional experience of Goodman Brown. His story is, like that of Tobias Pearson, Hawthorne's way of inspecting certain pervasive Puritan attitudes. If Hawthorne would not “localize” his response to 1692, neither would he quite “universalize” it. We will not find him saying (explicitly) with certain modern historians that, since nearly everyone in the seventeenth century believed in witchcraft, there can be nothing peculiar about the episode at Salem Village; nor (implicitly) with certain modern critics that, since all minds are tempted to bad faith and projection, there can be no specifically “Puritan” version of witchcraft. In Hawthorne's rigorous view, Goodman Brown's forest-education enfigures the ultimate breakdown of the Puritan attempt to define the human form of the Kingdom of God: “spectral evidence” turns out to be only the negative test case of the definitive Puritan problem of “visible sanctity.”

II

At the beginning of his fateful excursion into the forest, Goodman Brown is a more than tolerably naive young man. We scarcely need to observe his dismay at hearing (and then seeing) communicants and tavern-haunters, saints and sinners, mixed together to sense his initial assumption that the orderly divisions of the Puritan Community embody Moral Reality. More particularly, his initial attitude toward his wife is so naive as to be condescending: “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee” (II, 89).⁶ On the face of things this is too easy; and the reader of “Fancy's Show Box” knows that, on the contrary, “In the solitude of a midnight chamber … the soul may pollute itself with those crimes we are accustomed to deem altogether carnal” (I, 250). But such naivete is far from his worst trait. Whatever may be the truth about the moral character of Brown's pink-ribboned wife, and whatever may be our own working assumptions about the relation between faith and salvation, we are expected to worry about this Goodman's belief that “after this one night” he can cling to the skirts of Faith and “follow her to heaven” (90). Even before we get any sense of the sorts of self-indulgence that may become available to Goodman Brown, we know that this sort of temporizing with one's eternal salvation is likely to be risky.

Actually, as it turns out, Goodman Brown is already in a state of “bad faith”: there has already been some sort of devilish prearrangement concerning his nocturnal outing; he knows at the outset that he is going off to “keep covenant” with the Powers of Darkness. His “excellent resolve for the future” may be temporarily successful in allowing him to feel “justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose” (90), but the rationalization is as transparent to the psychologist as the risk is to the theologian; it is not likely to stand much testing. And, as an external sign of his compromised internal condition, he has already begun to be suspicious of others, even those in whose virtue he is most accustomed naively to trust. Accordingly, his wife's understandable plea that he stay with her, to quiet her fears, on this “of all nights of the year,” draws a nervously revealing response: “Dost thou doubt me already, and we but three months married?” (89). Now October 31 is a good night for Puritans to stay home,⁷ and there is not the slightest evidence to suggest that Faith doubts her husband in any way. Brown's attitude is clearly some sort of guilty projection: his own will-to-evil is already causing him to begin the transfer of his own moral obliquity to others.

Clearly, then, much more is at stake than simple naivete, or the much-discussed innocence of the archetypal American hero. Studied closely, Brown's situation is not much like that of Robin Molineux.⁸ And well before the analyst has much evidence of oedipal anxiety to work on, any decent theologian (Puritan or otherwise) is constrained to conclude that Goodman Brown is deeply involved in that particular sort of bad faith which used to be called “presumption.” He is assuming his own final perseverance, even as he deliberately embarks on a journey which he knows is directed diametrically away from the normal pursuit of salvation. The point is not trivial: to understand the “unpardonable” gravity of his initial moral assumptions is to be protected from being more tender-minded about the terrifying results of his experience than Hawthorne's tough and tight-lipped conclusion asks us to be. No especially severe morality is required to see that, from one very significant point of view, Goodman Brown deserves whatever happens.⁹

Given the unflinching and unpardoning outcome, of a story that is already well under way when we first began to hear about it, we ought to find ourselves wondering how Goodman Brown has got himself already so far involved in the “unpardonable sin” of presumption. If everything seems to follow from, or indeed to be contained in, the initial situation of the story, perhaps that initial situation itself deserves very careful attention. We need to proceed with care: on the one hand, it is very easy to distort and make nonsense out of Hawthorne's delicate ethical formulae by going behind the donnée of his initial premises; on the other hand, his stories are often packed with clues about exactly “where,” morally speaking, we really are. And “Young Goodman Brown” does not leave us entirely without such clues.

If Brown is “but three months married” to Faith, then it is absolutely necessary to regard him as a recent convert to the high mysteries of the Puritan religion; Thomas Connolly is certainly right about this, even if the story is not as purely or consistently “allegorical” as he wants it to be.¹⁰ But evidently the situation is not quite simple, for we swiftly learn that this good man's father and grandfather have been faithful Puritans before him; and that he himself has been duly catechized, in his youth, by the dutiful Goody Cloyse. At the first glance there may seem to be some sort of confusion in the allegory: can Goodman Brown be, at once, a new convert and an heir to a redoubtable saintly ancestry and a formidable Christian nurture? The solution to this apparent difficulty, as well as the key to Goodman Brown's presumptuous psychology, lies in the implicit but clear and precise Puritan background of the story, in the subtly emphasized fact that Young Goodman Brown is a third-generation Puritan.

Thus even before we encounter any enchantments, we are forced to realize that Hawthorne's reading in Mather's Magnalia has been extremely perceptive and that his use of a particular Puritan world is entirely functional; for Goodman Brown is quite evidently the product (victim, as it turns out) of the Half-Way Covenant, that bold compromise by which the Puritans tried to salvage their theory of “visible sanctity,” of a church composed of fully professed saints, in the face of changing historical conditions.¹¹ Externally, at least, Goodman Brown's status is perfectly standard, indeed inevitable: as a third-generation Puritan he would have been spending the years of his minority in the half-way situation defined by the compromise of 1662. Grandson of an original saint, son of a professing member, he has been reared, like virtually everyone else in his generation, in the half-way condition of presumptive but not yet professed or tested sainthood. Obviously he has had something to do with the community of visible saints because the promises of the new covenant are made with “the seed” of saints as well as with the saints themselves; but just as obviously he has not (until very recently) been a full, “communing” member because he had not been capable of that fully voluntary confession of conversion and profession of committed sainthood which alone could redeem the New England Way from the crassest sort of tribalism.

Original sin might well be transmitted by the simple act of physical generation. So also, as the theological plot thickened, might something called “federal grace”; or, less technically, a saint might fairly expect baptism for his seed, and baptism ought to have some gracious significance. But in the last analysis the new birth had to be truly “spiritual” in every sense; thus “sanctifying grace” could come neither biologically nor by infant ritual. And so, as the New England theology gradually clarified itself, that troubled third generation of Puritans simply had to wait: in the expectation of full, visible sainthood eventually, they all attended church, were duly catechized and nurtured, were thoroughly indoctrinated (and threatened) by jeremiads into the proper respect for the ancestral appearances of saintliness. And eventually some, however few, were admitted into that most guarded and holy of holies—full, “communing” membership.¹² Into this ultimate earthly state, Goodman Brown has but newly entered. After years of “preparation” and presumptive but not proven sainthood Goodman Brown has, we must infer, finally received official certification by the public representatives of the Communion of Saints. In an ultimate theological sense, which in his world is by no means trivial, Brown has finally arrived. And this fact can scarcely be unrelated to the terrible ease of his moral premises.

Goodman Brown's assurance is not, one should hasten to stress, orthodox. The expounders of the Puritan system never tired of emphasizing that (despite Calvin's stress on the “comfort” the saint might find in a predestinarian system) one's assurance could never be complete: indeed too great (or, at any rate, too easy) an assurance should certainly mean that one's experience of gracious regeneration was illusory. But Hawthorne was no mere “expounder” of the system, and he seems to have sensed that all such warnings would not alter the basic psychology of the situation. Some modern commentators have held that the Half-Way Covenant inevitably cheapened the concept of sainthood by allowing some recognizable church-status to persons without, so far as they or anyone else could tell, any specifically “Christian experience.”¹³ Apparently Hawthorne thought otherwise: whenever one declared oneself a saint and had that weighty claim accepted by the community, the basic declaration and the social fact might well tend to loom larger, psychologically, than any attendant (fussy) qualifications about continuing uncertainty, or about the sole importance of God's free grace in the process, or about the continuing need for watchfulness and sanctification; and by providing a formalized schema of waiting or probation out of which many persons never moved, the Half-Way Covenant may well have served to increase this basic psychological tendency. Although the new dispensation served to broaden the base of baptized membership in the Puritan churches, it left the inner circle of full communicants as small as ever, and seemed, if anything, to heighten the significance of that sanctum sanctorum.¹⁴

When one moved, then, from the lamented and berated coolness of half-way membership into the warmth of full communion, the event could have no small significance. And one perfectly likely (though by no means “approved”) meaning of such an experience is implied in the moral posture of Goodman Brown as recent-convert. After all protective distinctions have been made, the doctrine of election, especially in the context of third-generation Puritanism, which Hawthorne so delicately evokes, is likely to mean the sin of presumption. Hawthorne seems to say it all in the first scene when he tells us that “Goodman Brown felt himself justified.” To Cotton Mather, no doubt; to Edward Taylor; or to any other approved theorist of latter-day Puritan conversion psychology, Brown would be an example of the bold hypocrite, outrageously presuming on grace: no really converted person ever would behave in such a manner. We can view him that way if we choose. To Hawthorne himself, however, he is only the enduring natural man whose naturally self-regarding instincts have been treacherously reinforced by the psychological implications of doctrine.

Now all of this is merely the story's background, implied by the setting and compressed context, and helping us to place the sociologically and doctrinally precise point of Goodman Brown's departure. If the analysis seems somewhat technical, we may well recall that, as early as the sketch of “Dr. Bullivant,” Hawthorne had been intensely interested in the mentality of declining Puritanism; and here he associates the experience of Goodman Brown not only with the context of the witchcraft (the most dramatic problem of Puritan third-generation declension) but also with the pervasive moral quality of that mentality.¹⁵ No one can read Hawthorne's known sources without sensing that with the death of the original saints, whose experience in England and in “coming out” to America made their stance of sainthood seem natural and believable, the problem of continuing an order of visible saints became disproportionate, even obsessive. The rest, perhaps, is Hawthorne's own speculation; but surely it is apt. No Arminian critic of Calvinism ever fails to warn that the doctrine of election protects the sovereignty of God only at the risk of human smugness, over-confidence, self-indulgence, antinomianism. The Calvinist doctrine of election looks very much like the traditional sin of presumption.¹⁶ And nowhere, Hawthorne cogently suggests, was the danger greater than in declining New England, in those exasperating days when the Puritan churches turned nearly all their attention to the continuance of churches constituted of God's visible saints. Obviously Goodman Brown's experience is not to be taken as a model of “Augustinian Piety.” And even if his career does not represent any sort of statistical Puritan “average,” he is a representative, latter-day Puritan nevertheless, following a highly probable moral logic. The general situation is indeed as Roy Harvey Pearce has suggested: “granting the Puritan faith … it is inevitable that Young Goodman Brown should have envisaged his loss of faith as he did and as a consequence have been destroyed as a person.”¹⁷

Accordingly, his situation will not bear immediate psychoanalytic translation or complete reduction. Of course Goodman Brown will prove anxious about his relation to his father, and to “his father before him”; this is an inevitable fact of Puritan life in the 1670's, 80's, and 90's, where, as Perry Miller has remarked, the spokesmen for the failing Puritan Way “called for such a veneration of progenitors as is hardly to be matched outside China.”¹⁸ It is their reputed level of piety which has, we are asked to imagine, been repeatedly used to mark the level of Goodman Brown's own declension. In a very real sense it is into the community of their putative sanctity that he has so recently been admitted. The perception that the Puritan world “in declension” was bound to be fraught with oedipal anxiety belongs as obviously to the order of history as to the order of psychoanalysis. And the suspicion that in such a world a son, however naive, might be all too likely to make certain diabolical discoveries about his venerable progenitors belongs to the order of common sense. Together these insights add up to something like the figure of Young Goodman Brown, the moral adolescent who, after years of spiritual (as well as sexual) anxiety, has newly achieved what his ancestors defined as “Faith”; and who is now, from the absolutely “inamissable” safety of that position, about to check out the reality of the dark world he has escaped.

III

The moral progress of Young Goodman Brown, from the presumption of his own salvation by Faith, together with a naive but thin confidence in the simple goodness of familiar saints; through a state of melodramatic despair; and on to the enduring suspicion that outside of his own will “there is no good on earth,” represents a triumph of compression unequaled in Hawthorne's art. Robin Molineux's “evening of weariness and ambiguity” is, by comparison, tediously drawn out. Here things happen almost too fast, and only with a sense of the special Puritan character of Brown's beginning can we accurately trace his path.

Brown enters the forest convinced that he can always return to the Bosom of Faith; his nice pink-ribboned little wife and his familiar place in a stable and salutary community of saints will always be there. It may be that neither his marriage nor his conversion has, after three months proved quite so enduringly satisfactory or perpetually climactic as could be hoped; but both have provided him with the assurance needed by one who would press beyond the limits of socialized sex or religion. Recalling the typological significance of marital union in “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” or of its absence in “The Man of Adamant,” we can see the danger of Brown's presumptive confidence. But the full significance of his presumption lies in his feeling that he can now explore the dimension of diabolical evil with impunity. Having joined the ranks of the safe and socially sanctioned he can, he believes, have a little taste of witchcraft, which is simply, as Cotton Mather says, human depravity par excellence: without the grace of Faith, “we should every one of us be a Dog and a Witch too.”¹⁹ An intriguing proposition. Now that he is finally sure which side he is on, he can afford to see how the other moral half lives.

The most significant fact about Brown's naive acceptance of the appearance of sanctity in his fellow saints is the swiftness with which it disappears. Based on the normal, approved, social, presumably “real” manifestations of goodness, it is destroyed by extraordinary, private, “spectral” intimations of badness. His ancestors have been “a race of honest men”; Goody Cloyse “taught him his catechism in his youth”; the Minister and the Deacon are pillars of the religious community, sentries who stand guard at the “wall” which surrounds the “garden” of true grace, models of converted holiness whose experiences are the standard by which those of new applicants for communion are judged. All this is evidentially certain: it is visible; it makes the Puritan world go round. But what if these same figures of sanctity are reported, or even “seen” to perform other actions? What if a grandfather is reputed to have had devilish motives in lashing a Quaker woman (half naked) through the streets? or the teacher of catechism is seen to conjure the Devil? or the sternly inhibiting elders are heard to smack their lips over a “goodly young woman” about to be taken into a quite different communion? Surely this contradiction of evidences will prove unsettling to a young man who has the habit of believing the moral world is adequately defined as the mirror-image opposition between the covenants and communions of God and Satan, and that these ultimate differences can be discovered with enough certainty to guarantee the organization of society. Only some very special, as yet undreamed species of faith could rescue him from such a contradiction of evidences.

Ultimately, of course, Goodman Brown passes through a phase of distraught, despairing confusion into a more or less settled state of faithless desolation. But more remarkable, almost, is the equanimity with which he at first accepts the Devil's “revelations.” He jokes about the moral secrets of his saintly ancestors: funny he had never heard any such family secrets before; no, on second thought he guesses they would keep their forest activities a secret, since we Puritans are “a people of prayer and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness” (92). With the telling and technical pun on “Boot” (a seventeenth-century nickname for the Devil), the joke is a little funnier to us than it consciously is to Goodman Brown. As yet he does not quite wish to define a universal Puritan hypocrisy as the prayers to God of people who actually serve the Devil. But he is still being rather too easily ironical about his worthy forebears. And if he is, in the next moment, truly amazed to hear the Devil claim such an impressively general acquaintance among the important personages of New England, still he responds less by doubting or discounting the Devil's claim to near-sovereignty than by writing it off as irrelevant to his own moral condition: “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the council; they have their own ways, and are no rule for a simple husbandman like me” (93). This social deference might be a species of humility; except that Goody Cloyse, with whom his moral connection has been direct and important, whose “rule” has been quite literally his own rule, can be dismissed just as easily: “What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven; is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?” (96).

Now clearly all of Goodman Brown's responses are still too easy. Even before the Devil has introduced his most convincing, most visible evidence; even when it is all a matter of mere rumor, Goodman Brown has been quite willing to accept the Devil's “doubtful” informations at something like their face value; he believes their truth and merely denies their relevance. At one level, of course, this mental operation is merely an extension of his initial bad faith in relation to his wife; at another, however, it seems to adumbrate the implications of some sort of belief in “limited atonement.” Brown's habitual, doctrinally ingrained sense of the relative fewness of the visibly elect is growing more and more keen. Firmly possessed of the distinction between the inner circle of proven saints and all outer circles of the many “others,” he seems willing to reduce the circumference of that inmost circle almost to its single-point limit. I and my Faith: it all comes down to that naive center. But since he has already deceived and abandoned his wife (and, in doing so, vitiated his faith through presumption), even this two-term protestation rings false. The Devil really has not very much difficulty with this Easy-Faith of a Young Goodman Brown. “With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!” (98), so our self-assured young man roundly declaims, after consigning the rest of his world to perdition. But a murmur of spectral voices and a flutter of spectral ribbons later and his “Faith is gone.” It could hardly have turned out otherwise.

And yet the swiftness and seeming inevitability of Goodman Brown's reduction to despair depend for their believability on more than his naive and presumptuous understanding of faith as a sort of private haven. “Young Goodman Brown” is, no less than “Rappaccini's Daughter,” a story about Faith and Evidence; and so there is also, just as crucially, the question of his evidences to be considered. Explicitly, of course, Hawthorne raises the question only at the very end of the story, and then in a completely non-technical way: “Had Young Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting”? (105). Was his evidence, therefore, only “subjective,” a species of that diseased fantasy to which the nineteenth century universally ascribed the witchcraft “delusions”? As David Levin has amply and carefully shown, however, the evidence or “reality” question is built into the story everywhere in a very precise seventeenth-century way. Not only are we apprised from the outset that Goodman Brown is speaking to the Father of Lies, so that scandalous rumor and innuendo may be even less trustworthy than usual, even in a notoriously quarrelsome Puritan small town; but everywhere the persons seen by Brown are referred to as “shapes” or “figures” or “appearances.” People appear and disappear in the most magical sorts of ways, and no one is substantial enough to cast a shadow. It is all, quite demonstrably, a technical case of specter evidence. And this is precisely why Hawthorne's seemingly casual answer to the dream-or-not question (“Be it so if you will”) is neither a coy evasion nor a profound “ambiguity.” It simply does not matter: obviously not in terms of practical consequences, since the psycho-moral response is certain and terrible, whatever the nature of the stimulus; and not in terms of epistemological assumptions either, since the choice lies (as Levin put it) “between a dream and a reality that is unquestionably spectral.”

It is really distressing to see a critic claim that Levin has tried to make all the stories' challenging moral problems go away by blaming everything on “infernal powers”; and that, really, Goodman Brown's “‘visions’ are the product of his suspicion and distrust, not the Devil's wiles.” The point is surely that in Hawthorne's psychological schema Brown's suspicion and distrust and the Devil's wiles are not different.²⁰

Hawthorne “believed in” the Devil even less than did Spenser, who had long before deliberately conflated Archimago's magic powers with the Red Cross Knight's suppressed desires; and as Hawthorne conned the lesson of Spenser's faith-protagonist, and then defined the problem in “Alice Doane's Appeal,” specter evidence became nothing but the necessary historical “figure” for guilty, projective dreams or fantasies. “Literally,” in the seventeenth century, Brown “sees specters” that seem to reveal the diabolical commitment of the persons to whom they belong; but this seeming is highly untrustworthy, and Brown's inferences are illegitimate. “Allegorically,” as we interpret Brown's twilight or limit-experiences; as we try, with Hawthorne, to imagine what sort of reality might lie behind the widespread but ultimately superstitious belief that people have detachable specters which may or may not require a pact with the Devil to detach, we can only conclude that specter evidence is projective fantasy.²¹

Once again, as so often is the case in a Hawthorne “allegory,” history itself provided the “figurative” term: specter evidence was simply there, a given; Hawthorne had merely to imagine what it really (psychologically and morally) meant. And if we really understand this perfectly historical but almost antiallegorical process, we can see how fundamentally wrongheaded is the assumption that Hawthorne merely “used history” as costume or as convenient setting for his timeless themes. Hawthorne's problem in “Young Goodman Brown” was not to find an appropriate historical delusion which might validly enfigure Man's persistent tendency to project his own moral uneasiness onto others; it was, rather, to discover the sorts of reality (some of them transient, some of them permanent) which made the belief in specter evidence possible at any point in human experience. As is the case with “The Gentle Boy,” “Young Goodman Brown” is primarily a moment in which there is brought to bear on an actual, complex historical situation all the imaginative sympathy and psychological acumen at the command of the artist. That, I think, we are constrained to call history as history. It is good history because the artist in question was one who constantly monitored his own, and speculated about all other mental life.

The doctrine of specters as a specific form of superstition is actually not very complicated, though the story is immeasurably enriched for the reader who is familiar with the witchcraft sources, and who can thus sense the full historic reality of Goodman Brown's problem as a classic case of seventeenth-century religious epistemology. Perhaps we need not linger over all the wonderful ramifications of the problem about whether God would or would not permit Satan to manipulate the spectral form of a person who had not entered the Devil's own covenant. The arguments are inexhaustibly fascinating.²² On the one hand if Satan can do such things, wouldn’t this constitute a rather drastic lacuna in the Providential order? If the observance of someone in diabolical settings or activities might or might not really indicate his adherence to the Devil's party, would not appearance and reality have come so far apart as to make the whole moral world illusory? What, more especially, would be the significance of that ever-so-watchful moral surveillance so characteristic of the covenanted community? What could you believe? Whom could you trust? But on the other hand—and Cotton Mather himself said it all—the scripture doctrine is clear: “the Devil has often been transformed into an angel of light.” And so, who could assert with assurance that, as some sort of ultimate Faith-test for a special people, a royal priesthood set apart, God would not permit Satan to impersonate saints so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect? But if the ramifications are teasing, still the crux is simple. To imagine the epistemological heart of Goodman Brown's problem, Hawthorne probably needed no more than a single interrogative suggestion from Increase Mather's Illustrious Providences: “Suppose the devil saith, these people are witches, must the just, therefore, condemn them?”²³

Mather is speaking, literally, of vulgar, “white-magic” sorts of witch-detection (such as the water test), which he condemns as using the Devil's own means to detect the Devil; and Brown is not quite the sort of “judge” Mather probably had in mind. Still, his question covers the matter of spectral activity as well: the appearance of a person's specter is, in precise fact, the devil's ocular claim that the person thus spectrally represented is indeed a member of his own desperate anticovenant. And it is hard to imagine a clearer posing of the question which faces Goodman Brown. Whether we are thinking of the Devil's verbal slanders, or the spectral sounds and sights of the forest, or those famous now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t pink ribbons, the case is essentially the same. For granting that the Devil is, from time to time, permitted to impersonate saints without their consent; and granting that in these days of his last desperate assault against the purity of Faith in the New World he would do so if ever he could; then, “literally,” there is no evidential difference between the Devil's general and urbane innuendoes about all the Great and Holy of New England and Goodman Brown's actually “seeing” Goody Cloyse, or Deacon Gookin, or his parents, or Faith, with or without her ribbons. Nasty small-town rumor, simplistic tricks of “materialization” such as even Pharaoh's Magi could perform, spectral simulation: in all these instances, Goodman Brown's vaunted “insights” into Mankind's Total and Unredeemed Depravity depend on a diabolical communication.

Such informations would be scanned. A less technical case did not turn out well for Young Nobleman Hamlet: things were rotten enough in Denmark, one discovers, but man's ghost-bidden (and oedipally anxious) revenge did not exactly accomplish God's Justice. And the case of Brown's direct spiritual ancestor is even more instructive: the instinctive “jealousy” Spenser's Red Cross Knight feels when he beholds the Spectral Una disporting in lewd amours with a Spectral Squire suggests that even the Arch-Magician's specters embody little more than suppressed suspicion or repressed desire.²⁴ Hawthorne is too sympathetic a moral historian to imply, flatly, that “He who believes in the Devil, already belongs to Him”; but “Young Goodman Brown” exists to suggest that any belief, whether literal or allegoric, in the Devil's account of the moral world represents a culpable degree of credulity. If you want the Devil's views, you must go to meet him. But if you do this, you are already on dubious ground at best; you might well expect the worst. And so, Goodman Brown's spectral intimations of Depravity are merely the seamy psychological underside of his initial naivete and (even more) of his initial bad faith.²⁵

Probably, if we find such speculations interesting, the Devil is telling the truth when he implicates Brown's ancestors in persecution and sadistic cruelty: these are, after all, the sins of Hawthorne's own fathers, and of the fathers of many others among his historically naive generation; doubtless the Father of Lies is well practiced in the meretricious rhetorical art of universalizing the Half Truth. Probably the Devil exaggerates when he claims that nearly all of the deacons, selectmen, and general court representatives in New England owe him their covenanted allegiance. (Hawthorne would have been, I imagine, less disturbed than some liberal modern historians to learn that, for all the historian can discover, there was indeed some real enough witchcraft at the bottom of the Salem hysteria; but his statistical reservations about the size of Satan's consciously enlisted army would have been as wary as his doctrinal reservations about the Totality of human depravity.) And presumably the Devil's use of the specific “specters” of Goody Cloyse, Deacon Gookin, and Faith is pure deceit: he conjures their shapes without their contractual permission in order to test (destroy, as it lamentably turns out) the naive and compromised faith of Goodman Brown. A cheap trick, perhaps, but not without a certain diabolical cleverness; and not, in this case, ineffective. Young Calvinist Brown may think that Faith is “inamissable,” that the final perseverance of the Elect is certain and “indefectable.” But Satan evidently knows better: even fully communing Saints can be had. Or, if the Calvinist Fathers of Dort were correct, if the gracious gift of a true faith cannot indeed be lost, then at least there is the diabolical pleasure of hazing the “presumptive” saint whose faith only seemed true and whose salvation was all too easily assumed. In any case, the extreme result of this new communicant's presumptive bad faith is his willingness to accept spectral (whether diabolical or traumatic) intimations of evil as more authoritative than the ordinary social appearances of goodness.

IV

Once we realize how fundamentally Goodman Brown's moral discoveries depend on the spirit (and the place) in which he asks his questions, we are inevitably led to wonder about the validity of the questions themselves. Clearly it is “impertinent” (in Levin's language) to ask whether the people represented to Brown in the forest are “really” evil: questions concerning the nature and extent of human depravity may not, in themselves, lie “beyond the limits of fiction”; but surely the true, ultimate condition of Goody Cloyse is a question whose answer lies beyond the proper limits of this story, which is “not about the evil of other people but about Brown's doubt, his discovery of the possibility of universal evil.”²⁶ And there is reason to believe, further, that certain forms of the depravity-question are themselves illegitimate. Posed in certain terms, they may be the Devil's own questions.

From Hawthorne's frankly Arminian, though by no means Pelagian, point of view, Goodman Brown is habitually making simple judgments about settled moral realities in a world where only the most flickering sorts of appearances are available as evidence. And he is asking about spiritual “essences” where probably only a process exists. In one very important sense the private evidence of the forest is no more “spectral” than was all the previous communal evidence in favor of the saintliness of the now-exposed hypocrites. Hawthorne repeatedly joked about the separation between his own real and spectral selves; and as the author of “The Christmas Banquet” he perfectly agreed with the Emersonian dictum that “souls never touch.” Further, he made it unmistakably clear in “Fancy's Show Box” (which ought to be read as a gloss on “Young Goodman Brown,” revealing Hawthorne's own doctrine of depravity) that stains upon the soul are simply not visible. Moral or spiritual status is, accordingly, an invincibly interior and a radically invisible quality. Any outward representation of a person's absolutely private moral intentionality, of his voluntary allegiance to God or Satan, of his “state” with reference to the “grace” of “faith” (even if this is not a process of constant, “ambivalent” fluctuation) is a mere simulacrum—a specter.²⁷ Giving the epistemology of Berkeley or Kant a distinctive moral twist (which Jeremy Taylor could have appreciated better than Emerson), Hawthorne means to suggest that all moral knowledge of others exists in us as phenomena, or idea, or appearance merely; the moral essence, like the Lockean substance or the Kantian ding an sich, remains an ignotum x. True, for certain fairly important social uses, we must assume that a person's statements and bodily actions correspond to his own intention, that he and not some devil is in control of his bodily form. But this is only a working premise. It should not be taken as an accurate rendition of Reality. Clearly a religious system which would, rejecting the ironic personal lesson and then the powerfully prophetic teaching of Roger Williams, confuse the compromises imposed by the necessities of worldly order based on appearances with the absolute configurations of the invisible moral world would be running a terrible risk.²⁸

In a sense, therefore, any answer to questions concerning an individual's absolute moral condition will be in terms of spectral evidence. Probably the truth lies with the Arminians and Pragmatists and Existentialists: man makes himself; he has a moral history but no moral essence, not at birth and not by rebirth; his whole life is a journey which may or may not lead to the goal, and a series of choices in which any one choice may undo the moral import (though not, of course, all the psychological results) of any other. The “sides” in such a world would be impossible to define. But even if there were sides, ineluctably defined by ineffable divine decree, who could ever discover them? Accordingly, Goodman Brown's mental organization (and, by implication, the Puritan ecclesiology) dissolves into moral chaos because in every instance he must choose between the show of social appearance and the specter of diabolical simulation and suggestion. In every case evidence counters evidence, where, Hawthorne implies, only faith can be salutary.

The paradigmatic instance of this dilemma quite properly concerns Brown's wife: the test of faith is Faith. Supposing the worst, let us adopt the improbable view that Hawthorne intends the forest experience of Goodman Brown to have the full authority of a sort of “Melvillean” vision of “blackness,” uncomplicated by the epistemological uncertainties inherent in the historical problem of specter evidence or the psychological problem of Brown's bad faith. Even if we should decide that Brown's discoveries are neither the troubled, projective dreams of a man in bad faith nor their literal seventeenth-century equivalent, a show of black magic put on by the Devil for Brown's private “benefit”; that is, even if everything he sees and hears in the forest is unequivocally asserted by Hawthorne himself to be “true”—his ancestors, his moral perceptors and models, and virtually all other New England saints are consciously and voluntarily in league with the Devil; even granting all this, we are still forced by the logic of the tale to make an exception for Faith. Again, grant that it was her literal voice from the cloud which obscured Brown's view of, and seemed to obliterate his belief in heaven; that her real and not spectral ribbons floated down to crush her husband's spirit; that she was really there, with Goodman Brown's parents, physically, transported to an actual blasphemous witch-meeting; still we come to a cardinal uncertainty (“ambiguity,” if you will) which cannot be resolved except by faith—either a gracious and charitable decision to believe the best or, alternately, an extreme of pernicious credulity. We know that Goodman Brown's own protracted dalliance ends in revulsion, expressed in his agonized plea that Faith “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one” (105). This plea, we must presume, constitutes his own last-second refusal to accept an unholy baptism and communion: in spite of his earlier blasphemies, he seems to draw back at the last moral instant. But “whether Faith obeyed” his plea, we, like Goodman Brown can never know with certainty. In the structurally climactic, epistemologically paradigmatic, and (for Goodman Brown) emotionally crucial instance, there is, evidentially, only uncertainty.

Ultimately, evidence fails. Finally, in a way Goodman Brown had little expected and is totally unprepared to accept or even comprehend, everything does depend on Faith. The individual can judge his own moral case. Imperfectly, no doubt, but with some legitimacy; for besides the Searcher of Hearts only he has access to the evidence of his own intentions, which are (according to Jeremy Taylor) related to his words and actions as the soul to the body. In every other case, moral judgment is irreducibly a species of faith. Morally speaking, we can observe specters flirting with the Devil, but (even if such a thing is possible), we cannot observe a soul fix itself in an evil state.

That certain people in a Puritan world might wish so to fix themselves, we can easily imagine: the case recorded by Winthrop, of the woman who murdered her child so that she could now be “sure she would be damned,” is full of terrible instruction; and doubtless there were many more unrecorded cases of persons for whom “a guilty identity was better than none.”²⁹ Especially in the latter days of Puritanism, when so many people lived out whole lives of spiritual tension in a half-way status, the temptations must have been both strong and various: simply to get the whole business settled; or manfully to accept the highly probable import of one's unremitting sinfulness (and perhaps to enjoy some sense of true significance in this world); or even to join the Devil's party out of sheer rebellion against such singularly infelicitous figures of Covenant authority as Cotton Mather. Thus for every village hag who practiced some crude form of image magic or evil eye to frighten her neighbors into a frenzy of self-destruction, there must have been dozens of more robust souls who saw their appropriate moral hypothesis quite clearly: “If I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil.” But obviously such intentions are reversible: above all else the Puritans tried to obtain repentant confessions from accused witches, to bring them back from the Deviant to the Normative Covenant. This might strain their predestinarian logic, but not perhaps unduly. One could be as wrong about one's reprobation as about one's election: in either theological case, one “consented” but did not, himself, make the really efficacious choice; and in psychological practice, a wild, desperate, overly wilful embracing of unconditional and irrevocable reprobation is probably no easier to protect from doubt or change of mood than the astonished and relieved acceptance of one's election. Certainly Goodman Brown ultimately draws back—from one of the most blasphemous declarations of despair in all literature.

But this is getting slightly ahead of the immediate question, which concerns the relation of faith and evidence to the serious moral judgement of others. The question put so directly and so unavoidably to the theologically ill-prepared Goodman Brown at the climax of his forest-experience is, quite simply, Hawthorne's version of the faith-question in its human dimension: in the face of the final breakdown of all reliable evidence concerning the hidden but defining essence of moral decisions or continuing “heart” intentions of others, which are you more prepared to believe in, goodness or badness? Much critical ink has been spilled over the angst of Goodman Brown's wracking doubt, his ambivalence, his inability finally to settle his belief one way or the other; and in an ultimate sense, of course, it is true that Brown does not hold a fixed and final conviction that his wife is in league with the devil. But practically there is not much question. Hawthorne did not need the will-to-believe analysis of William James to tell him that theoretical doubts have a way of solving themselves in practice, in accordance with the individual's deepest suspicions: and at this level Brown's ideas are quite clear. He hears an “anthem of sin” when the congregation sings a holy psalm; he scowls while his family prays; he shrinks at midnight from the bosom of Faith; and he dies in an aura which even Puritans recognize as one of inordinate moral gloom.

To be sure, he does not die in precisely the same state of “despair” that sent him raging through the forest, challenging the Devil, burning to meet him on his own ground. At that moment his despair is universal: “there is no good on earth; and sin is but a name.” At that moment it includes himself; indeed it applies to himself preeminently: “Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you” (99). At that moment only does the element of hesitancy (or as one recent critic rightly insists, “ambivalence”) disappear from his mental state; and as it disappears Brown becomes guilty not only of some sort of cosmic blasphemy but also of that personal and technical sort of “despair” which, in its utter abandonment of the possibility of personal redemption, constitutes the second of traditional Christianity's two unpardonable sins—the other, its obverse, being the presumption with which Brown began. But as we have said, this lurid, melodramatic phase subsides: his call upon Faith to “resist” is, in part, his way of taking back his own overly wilful self-abandonment.³⁰ And thus, as he was initially not entirely certain he wanted to sneak off into the forest at all, so he is finally not convinced that he himself is a lost soul. Nevertheless neither his crucial refusal of baptism nor his returning ambivalence can now save him from some sort of moral gloom for which there may be no neatly prepared theological name, but which the story exists to define. Indeed Goodman Brown's final (exorcised) state may be his worst of all.

Having begun by assuming that all visible sanctity was real sanctity, and by presuming his own final perseverance in faith; having next despaired of all goodness; he ends by doubting the existence of any ultimate goodness but his own. There is, it seems to me, no other way to account for the way Goodman Brown spends the rest of his life. Evidently he clings to the precious knowledge that he, at least, resisted the wicked one's final invitation to diabolical communion; accordingly, the lurid satisfactions of Satan's anti-Covenant are not available to him. But neither are the sweet delights of the Communion of Saints. He knows he resisted the “last, last crime” of witchcraft, but his deepest suspicion seems to be that Faith did not resist. Or if that seems too strong a formulation for sentimental readers, he cannot make his faith in Faith prevail. Without such a prevailing faith, he is left outside the bounds of all communion: his own unbartered soul is the only certain locus of goodness in a world otherwise altogether blasted.³¹

It would be easy enough to praise Young Goodman Brown for his recovery from the blasphemous nihilism of his mid-forest rage against the universe; for his refusal to translate his cosmic paranoia into an Ahabian plan of counterattack. Or, from another point of view, it would even be possible to suggest that if the Devil's proffered community of evil is the only community possible, perhaps he should have accepted membership instead of protecting the insular sacredness of his own separate and too precious soul. Perhaps salvation is not worth having—perhaps it is meaningless—in a universe where depravity has undone so many. But both of these moral prescriptions miss Hawthorne's principal emphasis which, as I read the tale, is on the problem of faith and evidence; on that peculiar kind of “doubt” (in epistemological essence, really a kind of negative faith) which follows from a discrediting of evidences formerly trusted. Brown is damned to stony moral isolation because his “evidential” Puritan biases have led him all unprepared into a terrifying betrayal of Faith. He believes the Devil's spectral suggestions not merely because he is naive, though he is that; and not merely because he is incapable of the sort of evidential subtlety by which John Cotton instructed the very first members of those newly purified New England churches in the art of separating sheep and goats, or by which the Mathers sermonized the court of oyer and terminer on the occult art of the distinguishing of spirits.³² Brown believes the Devil because, at one level, the projected guilt of a man in bad faith is specter evidence and because, even more fundamentally, absolute moral quality is related to outward appearance as a real person is to his specter.

In short, Hawthorne suggests, one had better not raise such ultimate questions at all: to do so is to risk the appearance-and-reality question in its most pernicious form. At best one would be accepting the deceptive appearances of sanctity, as Goodman Brown evidently continued to be accepted at the communion table of a community which never suspected his presumption, despair, blasphemy and his near approach to witchcraft; or as the representative Mr. Smith of “Fancy's Show Box” is, in later times, accepted as a paragon in spite of his impressive list of sinful intentions. And at worst, if one is already in bad faith, his penetrating glimpses into the “reality” behind the appearances will be no more than spectral projections of his own guilty wishes; such are the evidences Goodman Brown accepts no less clearly than Leonard Doane or Spenser's Red Cross Knight. The truly naive will simply accept the smiling light of daytime, church-day appearances; the already compromised will “see” in others (as irrevocable commitment) what already preexists in themselves (as fantasy, wish, desire, or intention). The only alternative would seem to be the acceptance of some ultimate and fundamental equality in a common moral struggle; a healthy skepticism about all moral appearances, firmly wedded to the faith that, whatever men may fantasize, or however they may fall, they generally love the good and hate the evil.

That such standards will suffice for all judgements except perhaps the Last, Roger Williams, Solomon Stoddard, and various Arminians variously tried to suggest, as against the main thrust of the New England Way.³³ What none of them could quite say, but what Hawthorne quite clearly saw the witchcraft “delusion” to prove, is that beyond this sort of moral and epistemological humility lie only varieties of specter evidence. And these, ironically, turn out to be species of perverted faith after all.

For finally, once Goodman Brown's search for evidences has ended in nightmare, his enduring doubt and suspicion prove to be only an abiding “faith” in the probability of evil. Lacking conclusive evidence, he yet suspects—“believes,” I think we may say—the worst of Faith. His doubt of goodness is equally a faith in evil. The Judgement of Charity (which the wariest of the Puritans always insisted was the proper rule in estimating the presence of grace and by which they almost undid their basic premises)³⁴ might construe even Faith's actual presence in the forest in some lenient way; charity ought to be willing to believe that a wife would refuse a Devil at least as soon as a husband would. But bad faith precludes such charity. What determines Brown's practical disbelief in Faith and in all “other” goodness is the subconscious effort of his own dark (if ambivalent) reasons for being in the forest, reinforced no doubt by the violence of his blasphemous nihilism; the total personality, it turns out, is less supple and flexible than the “will.” Brown's initial easy-faith in his own election, which makes everything else possible, is based on the evidence of his acceptance (finally!) into a community of professing, visible saints. His final gloomy-faith in the reprobation of the rest of his world is based on the suppression and outward projection of his own continuing fallenness. Goodman Brown believes the Devil's spectral evidence because ultimately it coincides with his own guilty projections; indeed the “levels” of the “allegory” collapse so perfectly that the spectral evidence produced by the Devil's most potent magic becomes indistinguishable from the bad dream of a man in bad faith. Goodman Brown's supposedly “inamissable” faith has, to paraphrase Poe, indeed “flown away.” And whether “In a vision, or in none, / Is it therefore the less gone?” The note of finality seems cruel, but so, apparently, are the pitfalls of visible sanctity for a Young Calvinist Saint.

V

Hawthorne will return to the question of faith and evidence, most significantly in “Rappaccini's Daughter” at the climax of his second or “Old Manse” period. There the “vile empiric” will turn out to be not any scientific experimenter or positivist, but the Brown-like Giovanni Guasconti, who loses his Dantesque Beatrice for many of the same reasons Goodman Brown loses his Spenserian Faith. By then, Hawthorne's fictional arguments will have caught up with contemporaneous religious questions; in the case of “Rappaccini's Daughter,” with the “miracles controversy” raging three-sidedly among Calvinists, Unitarians, and Transcendentalists, and with the universal problem of the fate of “historical Christianity” of which that controversy is a part.³⁵ But in the early and middle 1830's, Hawthorne is not yet writing “The History of His Own Time.” His outlook is still dominated, and his most serious concerns are still unified, by his wide and perceptive readings in seventeenth-century Puritanism; the subjects of his most penetrating analyses are still Puritans trapped by the moral definitions of their historical world. As with “The Gentle Boy,” “Young Goodman Brown” unarguably demonstrates that (however we choose to define “history as history”) Hawthorne's most powerful early stories grew directly out of an authentic and creative encounter with the Puritan mind.

The neo-Puritan Calvinism of Hawthorne's own nineteenth-century world was, despite its fairly widespread continuance of the structures begun with the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, not obsessively concerned with the attempt to unite the visible church with the invisible. Most local New England religious communities were still divided into “the church” (of converted saints) and “the congregation” (of hopeful, or interested, or habitual service-attenders); often the line divided families in half, or even into more disproportionate fractions; but the explosive potential seemed to be going out of such divisions. Despite the undeniable effect of successive waves of revival enthusiasm which stressed the saving (and normative) importance of a converting “Christian experience,” New England seemed to be on its way to learning the lesson summarized so succinctly, much later, by the heroine of Harold Fredric's most Hawthornean novel: “The sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not the minute sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad and indifferent are all braided up together in every man's nature, and every woman's too.”³⁶ Hawthorne was, no doubt, helping to teach or to reinforce that lesson, along with everyone else involved in any way with “the moral argument against Calvinism.” But it was a lesson already pretty well learned in practice, if not a doctrine settled in theory. And it would be doing Hawthorne no essential service to assert this sort of historical “relevance” as one of the chief claims to greatness of “Young Goodman Brown.”

“Young Goodman Brown” is, nevertheless, a dazzling achievement of the historical imagination, and its greatness cannot be accounted for without close and continuous reference to its insight into the psychology of religion in New England, especially in its most “troubled” period. From one point of view, “Young Goodman Brown” may well be “Freud Anticipated”; from another it unquestionably is “Spenser Applied.” But it applies the Spenserian teaching to New England's problems of spectral evidence and visible sanctity as certainly and as precisely as “The Maypole of Merrymount” applies the Miltonic doctrines of mythic innocence and historic fall to the problem of America's imaginative (and political) state; or, later, as surely as “The Celestial Railroad” would apply Bunyan; or “Rappaccini's Daughter,” Dante; or “Ethan Brand,” Goethe, to problems which had a specific American context and quiddity. And if “Young Goodman Brown” is one of Hawthorne's more stunning anticipations of Freudian themes, it discovers these themes in the historical record, not only in the painfully obvious testimony of men who were lewdly tempted at night by the “specter” of the local prostitute, but also in that painfully distressing record of the moral identity crisis which two generations of Saints had inevitably if inadvertently prepared for a third. Granted the “enthusiastic” decision of the 1630's to depart from all previous Reformation practice and require virtual “proof” of sainthood for full membership in Congregations of Visible Saints; and granted the existence of scores of diaries and spiritual autobiographies from the first and second generations of New England saints, documents written “Of Providence, For Posterity,” solemnly charging the son “to know and love the great and most high god … of his father”; granted these, the piteous and fearful experience of Puritanism's third generation was indeed inevitable.³⁷ And Hawthorne has enfigured it all, with classic economy and without misplaced romantic sympathy, in the tragic career of Young Goodman Brown.

First of all, Hawthorne has completely elided the sentimental question of “persecuted innocence” which, as Michael Bell has shown, so obsessed the popular romancers who dealt with the episode of 1692. Furthermore, he has gone beyond all naive versions of the question of witchcraft “guilt”—individual or collective, unique or commonplace, original or actual, self-limiting or transmitted—which troubled those of his more professionally historical contemporaries who knew or cared enough to consider the problem, and with which he himself wrestled somewhat clumsily (if honestly) in the beginning and end of “Alice Doane's Appeal.”³⁸ In this, though not in every instance, Hawthorne is a writer of psycho-historical fiction; as such, and with the full authority of Scott behind him, he has gone straight to the task of creating a doctrinally adequate and dramatically believable version of “how it might have felt” to live in the moral climate of Puritanism's most troubled years. The imaginative insight which lies behind “Young Goodman Brown” may stand as a significant part of Hawthorne's reasons for being so “fervently” glad to have been born beyond the temporal limits of the Puritan world. Hawthorne was, to be sure, far from unique in preferring the moral climate of the 1830's to that of the 1690's: perhaps only a minority of his readers (in Boston, or Salem, or Concord at least) really felt that America had declined, even from the best qualities of the noblest figures of the first generation of Puritan Fathers; and, less tendentiously, it would imply no very impressive moral or political virtue to prefer the liberal utterances of William Ellery Channing to the jeremiad rhetoric of The Spirit of the Pilgrims. But no one else in Hawthorne's generation was able to dramatize with such compelling clarity, and with so firm a grasp of the psychological implications of doctrine, what the older system might have meant to a representative individual conscience.³⁹ And beyond this achievement of history as psychological vivification, there is the brilliant hypothesis by which Hawthorne has offered Goodman Brown's representative encounters with the spectral world as a comment on the meaning of witchcraft in the specific context of latter-day Puritan experience.

Except for those who have set out to blacken the Puritans by cliché and oversimplification, most modern commentators are at pains to prove that there is no operable or intelligible connection between New England's Puritanism and its problems with witchcraft. The American Puritans, it has been tediously reiterated, executed fewer witches and gave over the whole enterprise of witch-hunting sooner than enlightened men and practicing Christians elsewhere. The whole accumulated bulk of such arguments, I think, would not have impressed Hawthorne. He heard the argument, at its source, from Charles Upham in 1831; and while he may have appreciated it as a subtler response than that of the romancers (who kept insisting that the persecution of supposed witches was simply the most horrendous form of Puritanism's hysterical intolerance), he seems to have seen that it combined two questions which must be kept distinct. For to establish that, up to a certain point in human history, everybody believed in and, from time to time, hunted witches is not quite to demonstrate that the belief in witchcraft, or the impulse to become a witch, or the need to expose and punish this form of deviancy has had, in all times and all places, precisely the same meaning.⁴⁰ Perhaps we could admit, a priori, that, deep down at its psychic source, all witchcraft is the same witchcraft—just as, presumably, all oedipal strife or all anal fixation reveals a single, boring morphology. But, obviously, that is not the only sort of “meaning” witchcraft might have. There remains the question of witchcraft as an event in intellectual history: what do various witches, witch-hunters, and skeptical critics have to say about the meaning of their actions? Such declarations might be a species of rationalization, either cheap or elegant; but people do put constructions on the most elemental responses; they do strive to find names for and thus make intelligible to themselves even those actions to which they are driven by their most unopposable “drives.” And in this sense, New England witchcraft has its own fairly unique meaning.

Certainly the everyone-did-it arguments would have astonished those men who wrote about witchcraft in New England between 1684 and 1705, including those who either attacked or defended the proceedings of 1692. Not one of them could doubt that what was happening was directly connected with New England's existence as a covenanted community of proven saints, a saving remnant against which the powers of darkness were most likely to be arrayed; at very least, what was happening had to do with certain people's vision of New England in these terms.⁴¹ In a sense it is our very historical sophistication which is likely to mislead us here: the fact that “such things happened everywhere,” and the discovery that, therefore, the Puritans were by our enlightened standards “no worse” than anyone else, is likely to blind us to the unique meanings witchcraft may have had in a (still) fairly unique Puritan world. Hawthorne is not so blinded. His suggestion is that, whatever might be the meaning of witchcraft elsewhere, in New England in 1692 it is not to be considered apart from the larger problem that Puritan Sons were having in trying to keep the outlines of the moral world as clear as they had been in the minds of those Puritan Fathers who first defined the community's project of salvation.

The reader of “Young Goodman Brown” needs to keep constantly in mind the first theological premises and the latter-day ecclesiological practices of the Puritan economy of salvation. For the Puritan, salvation “by faith” was in a sense “voluntary,” but it was by no means a free option depending critically on the originating impulse of man; rather it was an event which the human will might or might not experience, according to the hidden “Pleasure” (or, for the more rationally inclined, the “Wisdom”) of God. But if the “Reason” of the Divine Decrees lay hidden in His mysterious and transcendent essence, the results of those decrees were a good deal more clear; no Puritan could understand why he was elected while still a sinner and in spite of his sinfulness, but none was allowed to remain ignorant of what followed if indeed he were so elected; and, in the seventeenth century, at least, it was the rare congregation which permitted the spiritually unsure to relax into a state of settled neutrality on the question of regenerating experience. After all sorts of appropriate distinctions had been made and a range of individual differences allowed for, the Puritan system (defined by 1636 and not essentially compromised in 1662) depended radically on the Church's fairly sound ability to determine who was and who was not elect of God. On all necessary occasions the Puritan apologist could, of course, argue that “visible sanctity” meant no more than sanctity insofar as that mysterious quality could ever be visible—that is, relatively and not absolutely, with human approximation rather than divine certitude. But in the end, as Hawthorne seemed to know, the defining essence of American Puritanism, socially considered, is its rather confident attempt to locate by profession, institutionalize by Covenant, and monitor by discipline Christian experience as such.⁴² No modest ambition this.

Small wonder, then, if such a group begins its witchcraft investigations with sufficient confidence in its ability to identify witches, those actively hostile anti-saints. If a people is accustomed to sift the relatively delicate evidence that constituted the rainbow-like shadings of the conversion experience, from the inconclusively preparatory to the definitively sanctified, surely the distinguishing of witches would prove a simple matter by comparison. Evidentially speaking, depravity should immediately expose itself by its very lurid and melodramatic colorings. And, once the problem was fairly raised and widely discussed, the Puritan system seemed to depend as essentially on the institutional identification of witches as of saints: not only psychologically or sociologically, as a certain style of normative behavior may seem to require and create an appropriate deviancy in mirror image of itself; but also as a confirmation of the epistemology which underlay orthodoxy and a guarantee of the logic which confirmed identity. If the Mathers (and all others who opposed the heretical innovations of Solomon Stoddard) were correct, the New Englanders were God's Chosen Saints, or they were Nobody. It was precisely because they were saints, organized and mobilized as such, that they were now being exposed to a plague of witches. If witch-identity could not be confirmed, then how could their own? And hence the “Several Ministers Consulted” might well call for “speedy and vigorous prosecution” in spite of their own clear warnings about the Devil's undoubted ability to appear “in the Shape of an innocent, yea, and a virtuous Man.”⁴³

One had always been warned about hypocrites in the Church, and one was moderately well prepared to grant the presence within the holy community of a few people who were simply wrong about their conversion. With less equanimity, perhaps, one could even accustom oneself to the bold reprobate who simulated grace for social advantage. Such cases simply indicated the practical “limits” toward which the theory of visible sanctity could only approximate. But what if it should prove utterly impossible to detect a witch? What if, in a given case, all the available evidence made it impossible to decide whether a given person belonged to God's Covenant or the Devil's Party? Then, presumably, one had reached the inevitable outer limit of one's world, and, if the question of Saint or Witch seemed vital, the reduction to absurdity of one's fundamental premises. Then, presumably, was it time to give over the whole attempt to make church-exclusions based on “visible” moral distinctions and return, in some manner, to a more lax Presbyterian system (not to say “free and catholic spirit”) of including everyone who was willing to announce his intention to do good and avoid evil. This could mean “Stoddardism,” but that was not the only alternative. It had to mean a recognition that Augustine was right after all: there is, on earth, no way to identify the invisible church with the visible. And it also created a strong presumption in favor of Roger Williams' rather than John Cotton's reading of the parable of the wheat and the tares.⁴⁴

In this ultimate context, what “Young Goodman Brown” dramatizes is the final failure of all “visible” (or any humanly “outerable”) moral evidence. To the explicit destruction of Goodman Brown, and to the implicit confounding of the Puritan system, “Young Goodman Brown” takes up where the carefully controlled, even exasperatedly technical definitions of “Alice Doane's Appeal” leave off: it lets us watch a representative latter-day Puritan fail the ultimate test of faith and undergo moral self-destruction precisely when it becomes impossible to tell whether his wife is a saint or a witch.

Brown's enduring suspicion of his whole world, but especially of his wife, gives us a quiet and reduced version of that melodramatic moment of madness Hawthorne describes in “Main Street,” when “among the multitude … there is horror, fear, and distrust; and friend looks askance at friend, and the husband at his wife, and even the mother at her little child.” There, as Hawthorne tries to be a fairly “regular historian” of the public frenzy of 1692, the problem is that “in every creature God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an accuser” (III, 471). But here, as we have said, the public frenzy and the courtroom accusation are absent; and accordingly, Hawthorne's approach is more radical. No doubt much of the historical record of 1692 is to be explained in terms of spectral deceits not unlike the ones revealed in “Alice Doane's Appeal” and “Young Goodman Brown,” but the ultimate question lies deeper. What Hawthorne suggests is that the “real” breakdown of faith in Salem Village and its “enfigured” loss by Goodman Brown are both the result of Puritanism's ecclesiastical positivism, of its definitive attempt to found a church (and beyond it a state) on the premise that visible sanctity can be made to approximate true sanctity. For Hawthorne, such a system could only end in nightmare: it introduced evidence into a system where only faith could be appropriate and salutary.⁴⁵

The witchcraft episode provided the logically necessary (if humanly regrettable) test. When in a spectral epiphany you realized you could not tell a saint from a witch, your logical world, by logical necessity, collapsed. When you realized that the Devil's ability to “transform himself into an Angel of Light” could be used one day, by Increase Mather, as an argument against William Stoughton's injudicious use of spectral evidence; and another day, by his son, as a way to discredit an impressive last-second, gallows-hill protestation by George Burroughs; then someone would surely see it had collapsed. Robert Calef may have seen it: his handling of Cotton Mather's behavior at the execution of George Burroughs is extremely skillful and suggestive. And Hawthorne certainly saw it: when a moving profession of faithfulness (such as ordinarily proved necessary and sufficient for admission into Puritanism's Congregational full communion) could be discredited with the same slogan used to warn overly aggressive witch hunters about the insufficient subtlety of their judicial epistemology, then the “dissolution of the world” which Cotton Mather feared had indeed occurred. It is not at all surprising to hear Mather regret ever having to “mention so much as the first letters” of the name of “This G. B.” And it is probably no accident that his initials are also those of Goodman Brown.⁴⁶ For although “Alice Doane's Appeal” depends on the Burroughs episode more directly than does “Young Goodman Brown,” still the logical contortions into which the case of George Burroughs forced Cotton Mather are built into the career of Goodman Brown.⁴⁷

VI

In Grandfather's Chair Hawthorne offers May 1692 as the end of the “era of the Puritans.” The event which marks the break is the death of Old Simon Bradstreet, “the sole representative of [the] departed brotherhood” of original-charter governors; after that “Sir William Phips then arrived in Boston with a new charter from King William and a commission to be governor” (IV, 483). Such indeed are the political realities, and so indeed might the story be divided for children. But in a far more fundamental sense, “Young Goodman Brown” shows us that witchcraft “ended” the Puritan world. Its logic of evidence could not stand the test of Faith.

We now know, of course, that it is unhistorical to believe in the idea of a massive popular revulsion against a clerical oligarchy which hurried a well meaning but unsteady populace into a frenzy of suspicion and judicial murder.⁴⁸ And yet there may be some reason to believe that the events of 1692 really did accelerate a growing disbelief in human ability to chart the invisible world. To be sure, the new charter forbade New England to use proven sainthood as the sole requirement for provincial citizenship; but it may not be altogether wishful to believe that the discoveries made in 1692 about the diabolical subtleties of spiritual evidence—and about the preeminent human need for Faith as a Judgement in Charity—may have hastened the realization that all temporal separations of sheep and goats are premature. If so, then the Puritans' first religious premise would be as intolerable as their first political premise was intolerant. The statistics concerning the desire for full communion just before and just after the events of 1692 are not available. It is clear, however, that the popularity of Stoddard's practice of open communion continued to grow; and that the hegemony of the Mathers was about to be challenged, from within their own sphere of influence, by persons who believed in the premises underlying a church of visible saints even less than did Stoddard. It is probably more than coincidence that one of the founders of the Brattle Street Church, which admitted all baptized persons to full communion and discontinued the tests for specific Christian experience, had written, in 1692, a fairly cogent letter against the basic assumptions of the witchcraft proceedings; and that he seems to have furnished Calef with his materials for More Wonders. And worlds of skeptical faith might fairly be read into Samuel Sewall's recognition of how the truth had eluded his most judicious search in that matter of “doleful witchcraft.”⁴⁹

But whatever should turn out to be the case in statistical or other “regular” history, the moral historian's view is clear: in bad faith and with a hopelessly inadequate sense of what True Faith might require, Goodman Brown has come to the end of the Puritan moral world; his inevitable moral collapse stands for the process by which the quest for visible sanctity leads unavoidably into the realm of specter evidence. A more authentic, less institutional form of Puritan piety might yet be “revived,” in 1735 or 1740 (or in “The Minister's Black Veil”); the political dynamism of Puritanism might be “reawakened,” in the various moments which make “The Legends of the Province House” bristle with the hostility of Endicott. But the power of “visible sanctity” to organize the American world ended in 1692. And the credibility of the logic by which it proposed to do so disappeared in doubt when Hawthorne's Goodman Brown discovered that only faith could save his Faith from doubt. Without accepting a fundamental change of premises Puritanism could, like Goodman Brown, continue to exist only as “gloom.”

Notes

1. Levin's widely reprinted (and variously revised) article originally appeared as “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” American Literature [AL], 34 (1962). Levin cites with approval the following predecessors: D. M. McKeithan, “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’: An Interpretation,” Modern Language Notes, 67 (1952); Thomas F. Walsh, Jr., “The Bedeviling of Young Goodman Brown,” Modern Language Quarterly [MLQ], 19 (1958); and Paul W. Miller, “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’: Cynicism or Meliorism?,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction [NCF], 14 (1959). He might, it seems to me, also claim some kinship with Thomas E. Connolly's “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’: An Attack on Puritanic Calvinism,” AL, 28 (1956). The most direct “answer” to Levin is Paul J. Hurley, “Young Goodman Brown's ‘Heart of Darkness,’” New England Quarterly [NEQ], 37 (1966); in my opinion, Hurley has misunderstood Levin's fundamental point, obscured the issue Levin was trying to clarify, and set criticism of the tale back a few steps. Evidence of this new confusion is Walter Blair's view that Hurley's attack on Levin comes “from a position much closer to McKeithan's and Walsh's than to those of other critics”; see the Revised Edition of Eight American Authors, ed. James Woodress (New York, 1971), p. 127.

   Critics who have grasped and tried to build on Levin's insights include the following: Darrel Abel, “Black Glove and Pink Ribbon: Hawthorne's Metonymic Symbols,” NEQ, 42 (1969); Michael Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton, N.J., 1971); Neal Frank Doubleday, Hawthorne's Early Tales (Durham, N.C., 1972); and B. Bernard Cohen (see note 2). The essential point, as I shall argue later, is that Levin does not trivialize the story by simply blaming everything on supernatural agency; rather, he provides the language to talk about Goodman Brown's epistemological problem, and he shows that “Young Goodman Brown” is about the dynamics of faith rather than the nature and extent of depravity.

2. See Thomas E. Connolly's “Introduction” to Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown” (Columbus, 1968), pp. 6-8; B. Bernard Cohen's “Deodat Lawson's Christ's Fidelity and Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 104 (1968), 349; and Levin's “Shadows,” p. 352. Levin's conclusion, of course, concedes the least to the anti-historicists; and the essays collected in his Defense of Historical Literature (New York, 1967) reveal the full depth and richness of his commitment to historical criticism.

3. Again, the problem with single-minded, “reductive” psychoanalytic readings of the tale (e.g. that of Frederick C. Crews) is that they very probably reverse vehicle and tenor: it seems likely that Hawthorne intended the figure of Goodman Brown to stand for a representative historical mentality and the tale's psychoanalytic suggestions to be applied to a complex historical case. In any event, it will not do to say that the story is about “escapism”; too much of the historicity so carefully wrought into the vehicle is then simply wasted, and all Hawthorne tales begin to collapse into the same tale. See Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 99-106.

4. See Doubleday, Early Tales, p. 202.

5. The present essay—a version of a chapter from a book-length study—was written well before the appearance of Bell's Historical Romance. He has, however, anticipated some of my own discussion—not only in trying to build on the insights of Levin, but also in seeing the direct comparability of ADA [“Alice Doane's Appeal”] with YGB [“Young Goodman Brown”] in terms of the theme of specter evidence. And though I quite appreciate what he means when he says that “what is obscured … in ‘Alice Doane's Appeal’ is revealed far more clearly in ‘Young Goodman Brown’” (p. 76), I think the matter is not that simple: there is little genuine “confusion” in ADA; the “sensationalism” is entirely controlled and purposeful; and, really, the revised “Alice Doane” probably exists to make a technical statement about what is going on in YGB and how it works.

6. All quotations from the story are from the Riverside Edition of The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, Mass., 1883) and will be identified by page number in the text. References to other Hawthorne works are from the same edition and will be identified by volume and page.

7. The story never actually tells us what night “of all nights” we are dealing with, but I see no reason to quarrel with the conjecture of Daniel Hoffman; see Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1961), p. 150.

8. The most explicit comparison is made, with rather too much self-congratulation about originality, by Richard C. Carpenter in “Hawthorne's Polar Explorations,” NCF, 24 (1970). The same sorts of similarities are pressed by Crews and, behind him, Melvin W. Askew and Richard P. Adams; see “Hawthorne, the Fall and the Psychology of Maturity,” AL, 34 (1962), 334-343 and “Hawthorne's Provincial Tales,” NEQ, 30 (1957), 39-57.

9. The earliest article to stress the idea that what happens to Goodman Brown is the result of his own initial sin is that of McKeithan (see note 1). For a reading of the tale in terms of the twin unpardonable sins of Christian tradition, see the unjustly neglected article by Joseph T. McCullen, “‘Young Goodman Brown’: Presumption and Despair,” Discourse, 2 (1959).

10. See his “Introduction” to “Young Goodman Brown,” p. 8. This “Introduction” is the third of Connolly's contributions to the Goodman Brown debate: the first is cited in note 1; the second—“How Young Goodman Brown Became Old Badman Brown,” College English [CE], 24 (1962)—is conceived as an answer to Robert W. Cochran's “Hawthorne's Choice: The Veil or the Jaundiced Eye,” CE, 23 (1962).

11. In my view, Hawthorne's ability to write YGB was as fundamentally dependent on his reading of Books Four and Five of the Magnalia—together with Cotton Mather's Parentator—as on any of the proven witchcraft sources, including Mather's own Wonders of the Invisible World. We know, from Kesselring, that Hawthorne read the Magnalia as early as 1827. And we strongly suspect, from the evidence of Grandfather's Chair (IV, 511-514), that it was a book he kept rereading, one that made as deep an impression on his mind as did The Faerie Queene. We also know that Hawthorne read the Parentator very early: he cites it in his early sketch of “Dr. Bullivant” (1831), though a corruption in the Riverside Edition obscures an allusion that is perfectly clear in the original (Salem Gazette) version. The impression of these works would have been augmented by a reading of Daniel Neal's History of New England, which derives from the Magnalia, and Benjamin Trumbull's History of Connecticut which, though written much later, rather “parallels” the Magnalia. But the Magnalia would have been enough: Cotton Mather's diagnosis of and prescriptions for the maladies of the third-generation Puritans would have given Hawthorne all he needed to know about the Half-Way Covenant and its perceived effects on the theory and practice of “visible sanctity.” There, as Perry Miller has suggested, were all the jeremiad themes collected (if not exactly compressed) into one very troubled and very revealing book.

12. “Revisionist” interpretation of the precise significance of the Half-Way Covenant begins with Chapter Four of Edmund S. Morgan's Visible Saints (New York, 1963). After that moment of clarity, things have once again grown confused, but two other books seem essential: for the theology, Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared (New Haven, Conn., 1966), esp. pp. 158-216; and for the sociology and ecclesiology, Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant (Princeton, N.J., 1969).

13. See, for example, Emil Oberholzer, Jr., Delinquent Saints (New York, 1956), pp. 7-12. The idea that the arrangements of 1662 cheapened the concept of visible Puritan sainthood seems to me at least as fundamental an error as the coordinate idea Morgan set out to answer in Visible Saints; namely that the Half-Way Covenant was the prime and unambiguous cause of a real and widespread “declension.”

14. This, as I have argued elsewhere, is precisely the representative problem faced by Edward Taylor in Gods Determinations Touching His Elect: now that there was some place for the doubtful, it took an extreme of something or other to declare for the status of “visible saint”; see “Gods Determinations Touching Half-Way Membership,” AL, 39 (1967).

15. The most important fact about the “Bullivant” sketch is precisely that any “literary” effect it may have been intended to have is lost in a welter of carefully qualified generalizations about the where and the when of “declension.” It is obvious that somewhere between “Bullivant” and YGB Hawthorne solved his technical problems by substituting representative dramatic instance for additive sociological generalization; but it cannot be shown that the locus of his historical interest changed very essentially. “Main Street” (1849) would be the other instructive example: it is at once a prosaic summary of the Puritan themes and situations Hawthorne had worked with in the tales written in the 1830's and preparation for a highly poetic treatment of those same materials in The Scarlet Letter. The burden of that sketch is, as Michael Bell has noted, the problem of what the original Puritan ancestors left to their descendants (see Historical Romance, pp. 62-64).

16. Although James W. Matthews is rather too casual in his suggestion that “A doctrine of one group of Calvinists during the time depicted in the story was Antinomianism,” still his suggestion that Brown's style of reliance on Faith is not quite salutary is well taken; see “Antinomianism in YGB,” Studies in Short Fiction, 3 (1965). Ultimately, this sort of “moral argument against Calvinism” may lie closer to the heart of the story than that stressed by Thomas E. Connolly—namely, the argument that Calvinism is really a religion of sin and damnation.

17. “Romance and the Study of History,” in Hawthorne Centenary Essays (Columbus, Ohio, 1964), p. 233.

18. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 135. The last word on the problem of the Puritan “generations” is still far from being uttered. The new demographic studies make the lives of ordinary New Englanders of the third and fourth generations seem less melodramatically lurid than one might gather from Miller's evocation of their lives as ritualistic schizophrenia—regularly confessing the “declension” revealed in those social “sins” which their developing economy and inherited ethic made it impossible for them to avoid. But even the most reassuringly statistical of the new studies cannot entirely avoid raising “oedipal” questions. Only by about 1720 did Puritan sons begin to be significantly free of an original and powerful patriarchalism. See, for example, Philip J. Greven, Four Generations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), especially pp. 261-289.

19. Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, quoted from David Levin, ed., What Happened in Salem? (New York, 1960), p. 102. Mather makes it clear that although witchcraft is indeed the “furthest Effort of our Original Sin” (99), still all are “tempted hereunto” (102). In itself it is a kind of despair, since “All the sure Mercies of the New Covenant … are utterly abdicated” (98). But the way into witchcraft often involves presumption: “Let him that stands, take heed lest he fall” (102).

20. See Levin, “Shadows,” p. 352; and Hurley, “Brown's ‘Heart of Darkness,’” p. 411.

21. For a suggestive account of how guilty projection might have worked in the actual, outward world of witch accusations in seventeenth-century New England, see John Demos, “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England,” American Historical Review, 75 (1970), 1311-1326.

22. The best way to prepare to read YGB with something approaching adequate historical alertness is to make one's way through G. L. Burr's Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases (New York, 1914) and David Levin's What Happened in Salem? (see note 19). Hawthorne's historical insight also appears to good advantage if compared to that of modern commentators: see, for example, Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, pp. 194-208; Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts (New York, 1949); and, for a revisionist emphasis, Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (New York, 1969).

23. An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providence (Boston, 1684), p. 200. The extreme suggestiveness of the Increase Mather sentence and its context is not an argument against the relevance of other sources, particularly Cotton Mather's Wonders. See G. H. Orians, “New England Witchcraft in Fiction,” AL, 2 (1930); Tremaine McDowell, “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Witches of Colonial Salem,” Notes and Queries, 166 (1934); Arlin Turner, “Hawthorne's Literary Borrowings,” PMLA, 51 (1936); and more recently, E. Arthur Robinson, “The Vision of ‘Young Goodman Brown’: A Source and Interpretation,” AL, 35 (1963). I have already suggested that the Magnalia may be as fundamental an influence on YGB as anything else; and the same would hold for the Red Cross Knight and Archimago episode of The Faerie Queene.

24. Evidently “Alice Doane's Appeal” takes up the Spenserian psychology directly: for Red Cross Knight and Leonard Doane alike, spectral deception is ultimately a form of guilty projection. Though the psychological dynamics are a little subtler in YGB they are essentially the same. In fact it is technically true to assert that the Red Cross Knight and Archimago episode provided the “mythos” for YGB: in both cases a young man who is rather too sure of himself is separated from his one true faith because he believes spectral deceptions which enfigure his own moral obliquity. Book One of The Faerie Queene is thus an even more potent influence on YGB than has yet been recognized: see Randall Stewart, “Hawthorne and The Faerie Queene,” Philological Quarterly, 12 (1933), and Herbert A. Leibowitz, “Hawthorne and Spenser: Two Sources,” AL, 30 (1959).

25. Again Increase Mather's warning seems as much to the point as anything else: “we may not in the least build on the devil's word”; if we do, “the matter is ultimately resolved into a diabolical faith” (Providences, p. 200).

26. “Shadows of Doubt,” p. 351. As I read Levin's argument, he does not really mean to say that all discussion of the nature and extent of human depravity is beyond the proper limits of all fiction, but only that this story is designed in such a way as to reveal that Goodman Brown (and we ourselves) can never really know the moral essence of others. Nor—contra Hurley—does he really deny that, once we do get beyond the “literal” level, Brown's experiences are “the product of his own fancy with no reality save that supplied by his depraved imagination” (“Brown's ‘Heart of Darkness,’” p. 411).

27. “Fancy's Show Box” provides a useful gloss on YGB not only because it stresses the “spectral” and illusory relation of Mr. Smith's solid-seeming outward life to his inner or intentional life, but also because it stresses the variability of intention. If wicked intentions do produce “a stain on the soul,” still this terrible doctrine is partly relieved by its counterpart; a reversal of intention blots out the stain: “one truly penitential tear would have washed away each hateful picture, and left the canvas white as snow” (I, 255). Furthermore, the dominant theme of the sketch seems to be the extreme fluidity of intention, the psychological impossibility of fixing oneself, once and for all, in a single moral state. For the most part, Hawthorne hypothetically argues (on behalf of Mr. Smith), we really do not know a firm intention from a flitting fantasy. “There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve, either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution” (257, my italics). Before an “act,” intention is hypothetical; and afterwards as gloating or regretting memory, it is scarcely more substantial: one can continue to “will” a sin after its commission; but one can also repent. What this proves, quite simply, is that Hawthorne himself could not believe in the permanent psychological efficacy of a compact with the devil. Of course, he is an Arminian and not a Calvinist: not believing in predestination, he cannot personally believe in witchcraft as a reprobate's embracing of the inevitable; and he can see no other way to make a will-to-evil fixed and final. To be sure, the will-to-evil exists. Goodman Brown in mid-career wants to fix himself in a depraved condition, and probably he goes as far as it is possible to go. But he pulls back. Doubtless Hawthorne would say that every other character in YGB has been similarly inclined, or had similar intentions, at various times; in the language of the story, they too had been into the forest, but had pulled back at the last second. What damns Goodman Brown, therefore, is something much subtler than a fixed and irreversible will-to-evil. It is his failure to believe that the will-to-evil is no more settled in others than it has been in himself. In short, he not only projects his guilt onto others, but he fixes it there. What has existed in his own soul as forest-temptation and then as forest-intention but never as forest-baptism must, he believes, exist in others as the final reality.

28. As is clear to us from a book like Morgan's Visible Saints—and as we are constrained to conclude was clear to Hawthorne from the Magnalia—American Puritanism's defining essence is the attempt to conflate the Visible with the Invisible Church, to test religious experience so severely that those who comprised the visible people of God should be only his elected saints. From within the premises of Calvinistic predestinarianism, Roger Williams was the first American to protest: after his career of purer-and-purer churches, he finally gave it up; deciding that election was a matter between the individual soul and God, he saw that the reality of election could not be made to guarantee any visible, worldly agency, whether magisterial or ecclesiastical. For a full and sympathetic account of his career, his doctrines, and his criticisms of the standard Puritan “Way,” see Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York, 1967); Morgan's book, in turn, is deeply indebted to Perry Miller's Roger Williams (New York, 1953).

29. The formula is one which Frederick Crews applies to Hawthorne himself, in his relation to his hated Puritan “fathers” (see Sins, p. 38); but it applies a little more appropriately to Puritan Witches than to our blue-eyed Nathaniel. For Winthrop's account of the child-murderer, see his Journal (1790; rpt. New York, 1908), I, 230. Arguments about the undeniable reality and psycho-social meaning of the Salem witchcraft may be found in Hansen's Witchcraft (see note 22) and Kai T. Erikson's Wayward Puritans (New York, 1966), especially pp. 137-159.

30. For Goodman Brown's refusal of baptism as part of a pattern of contrary motivation, see Walter J. Paulits, “Ambivalence in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” AL, 41 (1970).

31. Ever since Richard Harter Fogle wrote that in YGB “Hawthorne wishes to propose, not flatly that man is primarily evil, but instead the gnawing doubt lest this should be the case” (“Ambiguity and Clarity in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” NEQ, 18 [1945], 448), critics have been sensitive to a range of meanings other than a simple affirmation of Calvinist Total Depravity. The effect of recent criticism is to make Hawthorne's own affirmations or denials more and more indirectly related to those of Goodman Brown: what does Brown believe? on what evidence? with what justification? My proposal is that though he is not absolutely certain the rest of the world is in league with Satan, his theoretical doubt amounts, practically, to a very strong suspicion. And, more important, that his suspicion is specifically and formally of others. Critics (like Connolly) too often assume that Brown's final state is to be described as a belief, or a near-belief, in the Devil's baptismal sermon on total depravity; I would suggest that, based on his own refusal of baptism, he is constantly making an exception for himself. However strongly he believes, or doubts, or suspects witchcraft in others, what he remembers about himself is not his mid-forest rage but his witch-meeting refusal.

32. For latter-day Puritan subtlety—not to say doubleness—see The Return of Several Ministers Consulted, reprinted in Levin, What Happened in Salem?, pp. 110-111. And for an example of the earlier mode of subtlety—on the distinguishing of hypocrites—see the selections Perry Miller has made from John Cotton's The New Covenant, in The Puritans (New York, 1938), I, 314-318.

33. Williams' solution, as I have already suggested (see note 28), was to suggest that, since true spirituality was so ineluctably “inner,” there is really no such thing as a true church in this world. Stoddard, like Williams, remained a staunch Calvinist and gave over the project of trying to make ecclesiastical distinctions on his or anyone else's ability to detect the presence of saving grace; but he remained a staunch “theocrat.” Treating the Lord's Supper as a “means,” and admitting to it therefore all baptized persons of sound belief and upright life, he essentially demystified the idea of membership in a Puritan church (see Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, pp. 227-302). Arminians, of course, disbelieved in the doctrine of “final perseverance,” and hence knew that only on the last day could the wheat and the tares be distinguished.

34. A very perceptive discussion of the problems raised by the notion of the “Judgement of Charity” is contained in Robert Middlekauff's The Mathers (New York, 1971). Especially interesting is the question of the subtleties the doctrine ultimately involved. Richard Mather, a Founding Father, spoke of “rational charity” but, as Middlekauff shrewdly suggests, “he might well have substituted ‘suspicious’ for rational” (pp. 52-53). A generation later, his son Increase, who knew (in the witchcraft proceedings) that the devil's ability to appear as an angel of light presented profound legal difficulties, also knew more about the difficulties of testing for saving Faith; he was, accordingly, more genuinely “charitable” in his “rational” judgements (pp. 126-133).

35. I have argued the “Rappaccini” case elsewhere: see “A Better Mode of Evidence,” Emerson Society Quarterly, 54 (1969).

36. The speaker is Sister Soulsby, the female evangelist in The Damnation of Theron Ware. The context is the crassly revivalistic Methodism in the long since “burned-over” district of New York; but if the situation strikes us as more vulgarly modern than classically Puritan, still the theological (and the epistemological) problem is the same—the American-Evangelical problem of the distinguishing of Saints.

37. For evidence that the decision to admit to the status of “visible saints” only those tested for “gracious,” or “faithful,” or specifically “Christian” experience was the result of enthusiastic fervor, see David D. Hall's “Introduction” to The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638 (Middletown, Conn., 1968), pp. 3-20. For a selected analysis of intimidating Puritan autobiographies, see Daniel B. Shea, Jr., Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (Princeton, N.J., 1968). The solemn charge quoted is from Thomas Shepard to his son, on the first page of his Autobiography. That particular document may stand as typical of the way first-generation Puritans created spiritual trauma and oedipal strife for their descendants; see Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 27 (1932), 357-392.

38. For the emphasis of the popular romancers, see Bell, Historical Romance, pp. 99-100. The obvious analogue of the explicit historical moralizing Hawthorne does in ADA is Charles W. Upham's Lectures on Witchcraft (Boston, Mass., 1831).

39. In my view Michael Bell has generally underestimated the differences between Hawthorne and his contemporary writers of historical romance; less in the case of YGB than of other tales, but measurably. See Historical Romance, pp. 72-104.

40. The classic formulation of the argument that there was “nothing Puritan” about the Salem witchcraft is G. L. Kittredge's “Witchcraft and the Puritans,” the last chapter of his famous Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1929). Though richer in examples, his argument is in logic identical with that of Charles Upham's second Salem lecture. In both authors, the argument is just as “tedious”—and, for precise intellectual history, just as “irrelevant”—as Perry Miller has suggested; see The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, pp. 191 ff.

41. As Miller formulates the case, “We shall avoid confusing ourselves by an irrelevant intrusion of modern criteria only when we realize that what struck Salem Village was intelligible to everybody concerned—instigators, victims, judges, and clergy—within the logic of the covenant” (The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, p. 192). The essence of that covenant, of course, remained the obligation to protect pure churches; and this obligation rested, in turn, on the ability to make a fairly reliable chart of the invisible, moral world. Clearly Cotton Mather spoke the consensus when he suggested that, after many “abortive” attempts toward the “extirpation of the vine which God has here planted,” the devil's growing desperation has led him to make “one attempt more upon us, an attempt more difficult, more surprising, more snarled with unintelligible circumstances than any hitherto encountered, an attempt so critical that if we shall get through, we shall soon enjoy halcyon days with all the vultures of hell trodden under our feet”; see Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, Mass., 1693), p. 7.

42. The formula is one of my own devising, but one may infer it from Mather's Magnalia; and I believe it will adequately summarize the findings of Edmund S. Morgan in Visible Saints; see especially pp. 1-32.

43. The “Several Ministers” are quoted from Levin, What Happened in Salem?, p. 111. The document in question then goes on, as is well known, to “recommend unto the Government, the speedy and vigorous Prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the Direction given in the Laws of God, and the wholesome Statutes of the English Nation, for the Detection of Witchcrafts.” If anyone felt any contradiction, the feeling is not recorded. And indeed, Cotton Mather subsequently makes quite clear (in the book which Perry Miller accuses of having “whitewashed” the whole legal proceedings and having “prostituted” the whole grand notion of the covenant) exactly what was at issue: if there should turn out to be no way to discover and prove a witch, then that fact “threatens a sort of disollution upon the world.”

44. For Cotton vs Williams on the parable of the wheat and the tares, see Miller, Williams, pp. 102-128. Since for the mature Williams, the only real church was spiritual and invisible, the field in the parable had to refer to the world: ex hypotheosi, there could be no weeds in God's real church, and of course there were sinners and saints in the world. Cotton's problem was far more complicated: after the revival of the 1630's began to wear off, he came to accept (and even in certain contexts to defend) the idea of weedlike hypocrites among the wheatlike saints in the field of the New England Churches; but he never for a moment abandoned the idea of a pure church of visible (and for the most part true) saints as the prime agency of God's Glory in this world.

45. The verdict of Marion L. Starkey seems to echo that of Hawthorne: the witchcraft “had brought a division and a sore sickness of spirit on the people. Husband had ‘broken charity’ with his wife and wife with husband, mother with child and child with mother” (The Devil, p. 248). Starkey even wonders with something like bewilderment how a husband could come to suspect his wife on the strength of such evidence as the Salem trials were able to uncover. Hawthorne obviously felt horror and revulsion at such facts, but he seems to have been too familiar with the supernatural projects of the Puritans to have been really surprised at any such natural displacements.

46. It is also possible that, at another level of consciousness, Goodman Brown's name may owe something to the story, told in the records of the Plymouth Colony, of John Goodman and Peter Browne. The two mysteriously disappeared from the Community one day at noon. Assumed dead, the two were actually hunting. They got lost, fell asleep, and woke up terrified to hear “two lyons roaring exceedingly, for a long time together.” The analogy is not too close; but the “lyons” may have been spectral, and Hawthorne surely knew what Adversary it was who “went about as a roaring lion, seeking whom to devour.” For the story, see George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New York, 1945), pp. 163-165.

47. See Wonders, quoted in Burr, Narratives, p. 215. The text of 2 Corinthians 11:14 was widely cited during the witchcraft episode. And, as things distressingly turned out, it could be used in opposite ways. Granted: “Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light.” But whereas Increase Mather used the doctrine to warn the rash about the subtle treacheries of spectral evidence, and so to restrain an overly vigorous prosecution, Cotton Mather evidently used it to “compass” the death of George Burroughs. See, on the one hand, Levin's selection from Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (What Happened in Salem?, pp. 117-129); and, on the other, the account given by Robert Calef of the death of George Burroughs (Burr, Narratives, pp. 360-361).

48. Starkey retains a hint of the older version: the people suddenly realized that “Their leaders had suffered the devil to guide them. They were turning from such leaders” (The Devil, p. 249). Miller's version is less melodramatic: “The onus of error lay heavy upon the land; realization of it slowly but irresistibly ate into the New England conscience. For a long time dismay did not translate itself into a disbelief in witchcraft or into anticlericalism, but it rapidly became an unassuageable grief that the covenanted community should have committed an irreparable evil” (The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, p. 208).

49. For the spread of Stoddardism up to 1692, see Pope, Half-Way Covenant, especially pp. 239-260. For the relation of Stoddardism to the Brattle Street Church, see Morgan, Visible Saints, pp. 139-152. Thomas Brattle's letter of 1692 is included in its entirety (along with most of Calef's More Wonders) in Burr's Narratives. And for Judge Sewall's change of heart, see his Diary (Mass. Hist. Soc., 45-47 [1878-1882]), for 19 August 1692 and 15 January 1696/7. And (finally) for a slightly different view of Salem witchcraft and the end of the authentic Puritan world, see Erikson, Wayward Puritans, pp. 155-159.