SOURCE: “The Forest of Goodman Brown's Night: A Reading of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3, September, 1970, pp. 473-81.

[In the following essay, Cook discusses ‘Young Goodman Brown’ in terms of Hawthorne's probing of the moral imagination, pointing out that Brown's motives are ambiguous, but that the results of his actions are “clear and frightening.”]

“Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart …”

Hamlet v. 2, 220

I

In a literary epoch when the dominant field of action was the frontier settlement, the forest, and the fort, Hawthorne focussed on the world of moral imagination. His “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) is a paradigm of this particular world, and Brown's behavior on a fateful night in his life is the key to this haunting tale. Although the motives for Goodman Brown's behavior are ambiguous, the consequences of his compulsive acts are clear but frightening.

It is truly an enchanted forest into which Goodman Brown enters on his way to keep a tryst. “The magic forest,” says Heinrich Zimmer in The King and the Corpse, “is always full of adventures. No one can enter it without losing his way. The forest has always been a place of initiation for there the demonic presences, the ancestral spirits, and the forces of nature reveal themselves.” Brown is no exception. For in the forest he is made aware of demonic presences, ancestral spirits, and he confronts the forces of nature in their strange and fearful aspects. “The forest is the antithesis of house and heart, village and field boundary, where the household gods hold sway and where human laws and customs prevail,” continues the explanatory Zimmer. “It holds the dark forbidden things—secrets, terrors, which threaten the protected life of the ordered world of common day.” With one exception this is true of Brown's experience. The seat of darkness upon which the castle of Merlin stands in the forest of ancient myth is transformed in Hawthorne's tale into a Witches' Sabbath where the enchantments of primitive mythology are secularized in the dour Calvinistic scheme of universal human guilt.

“But the chosen one, the elect, who survives its [the enchanted forest's] deadly peril is,” as Zimmer says, “reborn and leaves it a changed man.” Ironically, Brown's initiation and rebirth represent an inversion of the customary ritual. His survival is physical; forevermore he is spiritually spellbound, the effect of which is both bewilderment and distrustfulness. Sinking into a torpor of unredemptive guilt-consciousness, when he dies no hopeful verse is carved upon his tombstone, “for his dying hour was gloom.”

The reader does not fail to see that as Brown goes from the village to the forest he passes from a conscious world to a subconscious one. Upon returning from the extraordinary forest coven to the commonplace village orthodoxy, Brown's traumatic shock leaves him a deeply suspicious man. To a reader indoctrinated in Freudian and Jungian psychology the tale gathers meaning from the modern explorations of the subconscious mind, enkindles the aesthetic sensibility by its reliance on imagination, and appeals to the antirational, which interests us in the surrealistic art of Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, and Joan Miro.

We are introduced to the strange world of young Goodman Brown by its “solidity of specification.” The locale is Salem Village; the time shortly after King Philip's War. Since the forest is fifteen minutes from the village, the action is significantly within the ambit of civilized society. Only the forest of the night is strange. The beginning and the end of the tale are real enough but the middle is somnambulistic. At the close Hawthorne inquires: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting?” Not to keep us waiting, Hawthorne begins the next paragraph balefully. “Be it so if you will, but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown.” If the author's “be it so if you will” is so much dust in the eyes to keep us off the target, I for one don’t mind. Hawthorne's make-believe is more evocative of the heart's truths than many realist's spitting image of actuality.

II

When he leaves his three-months' wedded wife, Faith (an obvious symbol) and her pink ribbons in Salem, Brown's nocturnal journey, it is understood, cannot be postponed. It must be accomplished between sunset and sunrise. Nor is it enticing journeying. The road is dreary and narrow; the forest is gloomy. The real can hardly be distinguished from the illusory. Shadow density is accentuated. Twilight fades into dusk, dusk into gloomy night. It is scary—“as lonely as could be”; and perhaps a devilish Indian stands behind every wayside tree.

Then Brown is joined by a fellow traveler of the same rank, similarly dressed, resembling him in expression but distinguishable. He is, indeed, the Devil. Not Cotton Mather's diabolical “small black man,” or Goethe's Mephisto, the tempter, or Henry James's clever Peter Quint, or Gide's raissoneur, or Ivan Karamazov's irritating alter ego, but certainly God's old Arch-Enemy—an urbane intrigant, who carries for a fetish a twisted staff that resembles a great live black snake. The diabolic fellow traveler knows all about the hereditary taint in Brown's forebears. “They were my good friends,” he acknowledges familiarly. He once helped Brown's grandfather lash the Quaker women; he kindled the pitch-pine knot with which Brown's incendiary father ruthlessly set fire to an Indian village in King Philip's War. He has, to say the least, “a very general acquaintance here in New England.”

Smooth, wily, taunting, facile in argument, mercurial in mood, now gravely considerate, now irrepressible in laughter, he turns aside Brown's attempts to defend the good works of his family. Subtly the Devil succeeds in infecting Brown with an apprehension of evil in his family, in his friends, in his moral and spiritual advisers, in the worthies of the community, and, not least, in his young wife. Blighting what he touches, and denigrating whomever he mentions in human society, the Devil casts a spell of profound disillusionment on Brown. First he exposes the duplicity of Goody Cloyse, moral instructress of Brown's youth, whose shadowy figure appears on the forest path in the dusk. Stubbornly Brown refuses to succumb to general suspicion on such slight circumstantial evidence. He will still trust in Faith. So the Devil to break him down confronts him with the revered minister of the village and with good old Deacon Gookin. Brown, who has stepped aside from the thread of the narrowing forest path, cannot be sure of the shadowy figures that pass along the way; only their voices are recognizable. Goody Cloyse had mumbled anticipatory remarks about seeing somewhere in the forest at “the meeting” a nice young man (Brown!). The minister and the deacon anticipate seeing a goodly young woman (Faith!) “taken into communion.” Even this trying episode is not enough to overwhelm the devil-resistant Brown. He looks heavenward where the stars are “brightening.” “‘With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!’ cried Goodman Brown.” And he does for the moment.

Brown's resolution is not shaken until he hears from an ominous dark cloud the “confused and doubtful sound of voices” of both “pious and ungodly” people. One lamenting voice is that of a young woman—apparently Faith—“yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain.” This low-pitched, connotative statement is surely a stroke of Hawthorne's art when we consider the emotional plight of a baffled and bereft Brown. Shouting out Faith's name, he is mocked to the echo. Then his resolution breaks and, in his extreme dejection, the dark cloud disappears and a pink ribbon which flutters down compounds his anguish. There is no goodness he thinks; “sin is but a name.” He capitulates. “Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.” Abandoned, he despairs, and despairing, like Ethan Brand, he laughs hysterically loud and long. Unlike the Devil's laughter, his is not mirthful, but terrible to hear.

Brown runs madly along the wild, dreary, obscure path that takes him deeper into the heart of darkness. The night is now filled with frightful sounds and, among these, as in Moussorgsky's “A Night on Bald Mountain,” there is a sound “like a distant church-bell”—the wind. Possessed by the hysteria of despair, Brown tries to outlaugh what he thinks is the scornful derision of the wilderness. In the forest of the night—that is to say, in the blackness of his subconscious despair—“he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.” Devil-possessed and despairing, he runs through the haunted forest, brandishing his staff, venting horrid blasphemy, outracing the fiend who, by now, has pretty well victimized the bedeviled husbandman.

Goodman Brown's frenzied charge through the forest is halted by a lurid red light in a forest enclosure where a grave and darkclad congregation, their several voices rolling solemnly through the wild night, worship at a Witches' Sabbath. Before the forest-hemmed group rears a pulpit rock, illumined by blazing pine tops, and among the assembled leaders of the Salem community are both the reputable and pious as well as the suspect, dissolute, and criminal. Sinners and Indian priests, heathen and Christian, are distinguishable but united. And leading the impious assembly is one of the grave New England divines.

When the cry for converts is raised, Brown is led forward by Deacon Gookin to the blazing altar where he stands with another proselyte, a veiled woman, none other than Faith. Welcomed to the loathful brotherhood of lechers, poisoners, parricides, and infanticides, the couple is exhorted to be undeceived. “Evil is the nature of mankind,” they are told. “Evil must be your only happiness.” Before the fiend-light of the unhallowed altar, gazed at by faces “that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, look devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land,” the husband and wife about to be baptized in “the mystery of sin” look upon each other and shudder. Imploring his wife to resist the devil and look to heaven, Brown breaks the spell.

The telltale disclosure of Brown's illusory nocturnal meeting is a natural fact. First he staggers against a rock which feels chill and damp. Then a hanging twig, which a moment before had seemed on fire, “besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.” The tactile fact disabuses his overwrought imagination. The fiery twig is delusive. Nevertheless the nocturnal meeting will haunt him to his dying day. Next morning he is observed in Salem Village “staring around him like a bewildered man.” He shrinks from the good old minister; he challenges as a recusant the old Deacon whom he overhears praying; he interferes in Goody Cloyse's religious exercises by snatching away a child being catechized, “as from the grasp of the fiend himself,” and he behaves strangely to Faith who “almost kissed her husband before the whole village.”

Young Goodman Brown is not the same man who at sunset the day before entered upon the errand into the wilderness with such grudging compulsion. The “fearful dream” has done its work. Somewhere in this fact and phrase is the heart of Hawthorne's message, it would seem.

III

How shall we riddle this marvellous tale? One of Hawthorne's attributions is an ability to penetrate the surface of conscious perception. In his introduction to Psychology and Alchemy, Jung says: “It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.” In “Young Goodman Brown” Hawthorne continues a lonely vigil in the dark surrealistic forest of the American mind. He reveals presciently the turbulence beneath the layers of the Puritan conscience: the form its guilt takes, the contributions of grace and election, the sense of justice, the invocation of mercy. He evokes the depth of the Puritan mind which expresses itself, not only in witches' waxen images pricked with thorns, but in the nocturnal coven and in the black man's book in which are inscribed names in blood from cut fingers. Under the spell of the dark imagination which apprehends tragic realities, Hawthorne never fails to acknowledge the community of human relationship. What Brown discovers is a terrible thing, surely; not that evil co-exists with good in human nature, but that “evil is the nature of mankind.” He also finds out what it means to be inducted into a mystery that makes him “more conscious of the secret of others.” And he exults as he beholds “the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.” One mighty blood spot! To the exclusion of anything else, guilt prevails, and all things are evermore suspect.

The effect of Brown's discovery is terrible. What he should have recognized as only one of the powerful forces in “the collective unconscious” becomes the exclusive force. After the night of the fearful dream, Goodman Brown, of whom there are thousands resembling him as his name, sex, and age imply, is unable to accept as true of himself what is true of all men: that evil is counterbalanced by an essential good.

The dream journey is a remarkable one. The compulsion that drives him is not only inward (he doesn’t, for instance, share its motive with anyone else, certainly not with Faith); it is downward. The descent is symbolized by the journey from daylight into night, from consciousness to subconsciousness, from reality to illusion, from physical to psychical, from light to dark. The chief positive factor is Brown's fidelity to the covenant, the consequences of which suggest that fidelity is not a higher virtue than intelligent exercise of will. The effect upon him is negative; he is equal to the obligation of the tryst but he is not equal to its consequences. He is forever turned darkly inward, a distrustful and despairing man.

When Brown returns from the forest, the nature of his change is as arresting as the motive for his compulsive pact with the devil is equivocal. He has been there, but exactly why he has had to be there is not clear. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the mythic hero. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” he says; “fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious venture with the power to bestow honors on his fellow men.” How little of Campbell's description of the hero can be applied to Hawthorne's protagonist. The world of common day is in the tale; so, too, is the region of supernatural wonders and the fabulous forces. But there is no victory, and so Brown's return from the mysterious venture is without prestigious power to bestow honors. Quite the contrary. An antihero, he rabidly infects his fellow man with the virus of his grim, inexpiable despair of human trust.

IV

What meaning does this tale have for us today? What in the story has survival value beyond the interest a reader has in the effectiveness of Hawthorne's artistic competence? How to account for Brown's malaise is really less relevant than the meaning of his actions. It would appear—and this is, I think, Hawthorne's insight—a case of psychic masochism in which Brown's compulsion is in reality the expression of the desire for self-punishment. Brown appears to do nothing wrong except to go through with a commitment that he might reasonably have rejected in the first place. Yet once having committed himself, he still might have exorcised the inner devil of suspicion. That he fails to do this is his particular story and our particular revelation. There is no forestalling self-punishment. Neither is it possible to modify the effects inflicted on others—on Faith and the community of Brown's fellowship. And this is similarly applicable to every self-destructive protagonist in literature, whether a Byronic, Melvilleian, Hardyesque, or contemporary fictional character.

The symbolic forest of the night is, in effect, young Goodman Brown's own dark soul where belief turns into doubt, faith into skepticism, and where the people encountered are the adumbrations of his daily familiars and ancestral past. This dream is symbolically true. Significantly, it underscores D. H. Lawrence's contention. “You must look through the surface of American art and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning,” said Lawrence. “Otherwise it is all mere childishness.” The symbolic meaning is to be found in the stresses and conflicts, the compulsions and repressions whose compensations, as Sir Herbert Read says in The Philosophy of Modern Art, are found in “the physical horrors of war and persecution.” The Walpurgis Nacht of Dachau and Buchenwald of the 1940's had its source in the conflict between the Nazis and the Jews for the extension of power in the economic system of twentieth-century Germany.

Hawthorne's tale embodies the effect of tensions applicable in the social life of a nation, a people, and individuals. “Young Goodman Brown” focusses on one of these archetypal stresses. The tale is, as we have noted, a paradigm. It focusses on a fearful dream that is part of our subconscious reality. Although Hawthorne's medium is fiction, he is focussing on truth as he understands it. But he has chosen to release this truth as though it were a dream fantasy. The gas ovens of the 1940's and the lurid Witches' Sabbath of the seventeenth century are equally symbolic. So symbolic, in fact, that he who runs may read, but he who runs with most deliberation may read the deepest meaning. Diabolism is quite as apparent in what others do to us by persecution as it is in what we do to ourselves when we fail in acknowledging the moral consequences of our actions.

The important point in Hawthorne's tale is not that Brown's malaise is, or seems, incurable, but that it is definitely symptomatic. Given these traits, tendencies, and impulses and the effect will be comparable. Anyone of us might be susceptible to a similar psychological predicament. The syndrome is complete. What is significant about the tale? The epiphany occurs when the reader released from the narrative's pervasive darkness is struck by Hawthorne's laser. However much Brown fails himself by stubborn will, determined pride, callow gullibility, and obsessively fixated self-centeredness, he does not, even in his frailty, fail us. As Robert Frost says: “So false it is that what we haven’t we can’t give.” This is one of the great paradoxes in the human condition. Brown's negativism challenges us to find a means of establishing positive traits. The opposite of Brown's unendurable world of incertitude is one where the enabling virtues of compassion and pity, love and trust, fidelity, and hope are activated. Brown, one in the gallery of Hawthorne's moody men which includes Brand and Bourne, Warland and Chillingworth, is the psychological victim hung up between damnation and salvation.

In the harrowing world of incertitude in which he lives out his days Brown is psychologically sick with the fear that what he has seen in the illusory forest of the night is so, that all those hallucinatory scenes were in reality peopled by victims of sin familiar to him. When illusions are mistaken for realities the victim is caught in his own trap; is, in effect, self-betrayed. Hawthorne's climactic statement is apposite. “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not desperate man, did he become from the night of that fearful dream.” In the forest of Brown's night only the wrath of God burns brightly. His journey into an awareness of evil brings a consciousness of guilt without redemption. Unable to transcend the experience through humility and compassion, he is resigned to desperation. In consequence, he symbolizes the man who is shriveled rather than tempered by the pain and suffering which accompany an encounter with evil. It can never be said of him as it is said in Meister Eckhart: “Not till the soul knows all that there is to be known can she pass over to the unknown good.”

Hawthorne's insight is startling: that confronting us everywhere is the inescapable universal guilt, like one mighty blood spot as ineradicable as the stains on Lady Macbeth's hands and soul. The effect on Brown—and on us—is haunting. This tale reenacts an unfortunate fall. Brown keeps his compact, encounters a demon, and suffers an ordeal, only to be irrevocably transformed by the experience in no soul-cleansing way. “But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter;” says Melville, “how small the chances for the provincials then?” Small, indeed, if the provincial is like Goodman Brown who, when tested by a searing experience, proves equal to the occasion but unequal to its effect, and forever after remains a victim of a corrosive soul-torturing suspicion of general human guilt.