SOURCE: “Hawthorne's Polar Explorations: ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 1, June, 1969, pp. 45-56.

[In the following essay, Carpenter considers “Young Goodman Brown” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” as companion pieces, with the first tale treating corruption brought on by isolation, and the second by society.]

The misadventures of Young Goodman Brown and Major Molineux's youthful cousin Robin have in recent years been as extensively interpreted as any of Hawthorne's shorter works. Since both tales are ambiguous and puzzling in the characteristic fashion of the best Hawthorne stories, it is not surprising that they have elicited attention from a variety of critical perspectives. Their imagery, symbols, cultural milieus, historical backgrounds, psychoanalytic implications, and mythic patterns have all been so thoroughly examined that we know as much about the individual tales as we can rightly expect from the application of the critical intelligence. Nevertheless, all this critical acumen and industry has allowed one curious lacuna to remain. Although alone among Hawthorne's tales these two are so closely parallel in form and manner as to be properly considered companion-pieces, there has been no investigation of this fact. Passing comments there are aplenty, but curiosity apparently has stopped there.

It may be that the close similarities in structures, characterization, theme, and imagery have been considered too apparent and obvious even to the casual reader, or it may be that these parallels have been assigned to coincidence. But the obvious in Hawthorne, as in James, is often only a surface which disguises, like Poe's purloined letter, matter of more than passing moment. The meaning of the scarlet letter and the golden bowl is quite obvious, but no serious reader would stop his consideration at the mere fact of adultery. Coincidence, on the other hand, while possible, is hardly likely. Whether or not Hawthorne was consciously aware (as I feel he must have been) of similarities in stories published only three years apart, his return to the same structure and themes more reasonably implies a proclivity of the artistic imagination than it does a happenstance. Painfully aware of the few thin strings on which he had to play, Hawthorne appears usually to have striven to make his works as different as he could. The parallels between “Young Goodman Brown” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” imply a powerful impulse to explore a basic problem more than once. One may charge the artist with a tendency to repeat himself—the greatest artists always do—but not with coincidence, because the artist is the victim not of chance but of obsession.

It would therefore appear reasonable to investigate the parallelism in these two tales and to determine the significant ways in which each diverges from the common foundation on which they both rest. Possibly these stories form a kind of test-case or laboratory experiment in which Hawthorne was able to try out his reagents in the same systematic way on what appeared to be distinct psychic substances, discovering in the process in what ways their elements were really the same. Or to shift an over-scientific metaphor to something closer to the creative process, perhaps by writing the same story as a twice-told tale, Hawthorne performed a kind of exploration of the boundaries of his moral universe—moving from the center to the verges and back again.

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The first evidence of parallelism, reconstructing the exploration as best we can, is the plot, a series of events sufficiently alike to lend themselves to a single synopsis:

A youth, identified obscurely by a generic and symbolic name, sets out from the security of home and family on a journey which promises to bring him to a new way of life. Untested and naive, he sees this adventure as difficult yet filled with opportunity. He goes somewhat unwillingly, and thinks on occasion of the home he has left behind, but is persistent in his search. Early in his journey he meets an elderly gentleman whose emblem is a staff and who seems to know more about the youth than he knows himself. Darkness falls as he goes on; his way becomes confused; from various quarters he hears demoniac laughter; he is half-convinced that he is subject to hallucinations. People and objects appear and disappear in phantasmagoric fashion; he is confronted at a climactic point by a devilish apparition; he becomes increasingly excited as he nears his goal and bursts out in demoniacal laughter himself. Watching a profane rite, lurid against a surrounding darkness, he very nearly becomes a participant, but comes to his senses to find the vision dissipated and the natural order restored. He apparently has been profoundly affected by this experience; the remainder of his life will be completely altered by the events of this one night.

In these days of Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell, such a plot is inevitably seen as a type of quest, and commentators have not been remiss in pointing this out. What might nevertheless strike an attention not too jaded with mythic analysis is the fact that both these stories exemplify with unexampled clarity the typical quest-pattern, much less “attenuated” or “displaced,” as Mr. Frye would say, than is usual in fiction, and unique in Hawthorne's work, where the mere shadow of such a pattern is rare indeed. Nowhere else, so far as I can determine, did Hawthorne write even one story that can be so neatly assimilated to the main circumstances of the journey of the hero as Campbell has outlined it for us:

The mythological hero, setting forth from his hut or castle, voluntarily proceeds to the threshold of adventure where he encounters a shadow presence which guards the passage. He defeats or conciliates this power and goes into the kingdom of the dark. Beyond the threshold he journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him and some of which give magical aid. When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward, represented by his recognition by the father-creator. He returns to the world but the transcendental powers must remain behind.¹

Not all of this fits precisely, of course. (It does not fit Campbell's examples precisely either.) But it does apply to several aspects of each story. Brown, for instance, meets the “shadow presence” in the form of his grandfather—really the devil taking on the form most suited to the occasion; he “conciliates,” or agrees with this “presence” that he will go into “the kingdom of the dark.”² The forest through which he journeys is at once unfamiliar and seems related to himself, even a projection of his own spiritual state. He is both severely threatened and aided on his evil journey by the voices he hears from the cloud overhead and the discovery of Faith's pink ribbon, an ironic emblem, fluttering down from the sky and catching in the branches of a tree. His supreme ordeal is in the very depths of the forest, where he recognizes and is recognized by the Devil, who is in this situation his “father-creator,” for Brown is to become a demon like those he sees at the blasphemous rite—a child of Satan. He resists this fate at the crucial moment, in effect returning to the world, because the “transcendental powers” disappear. Yet Brown has been drawn into the orbit of evil by his experience, and he never recovers from it.

Robin, whose other name must be Molineux, although Hawthorne goes to some pains to conceal this fact from us,³ meets a kind of “shadow presence,” in the person of an elderly gentleman who represents the society of the town and who refuses to answer Robin's questions: he is a guardian of the town's secret. Robin neither conciliates nor defeats this guardian but is not deterred in his search. The forces which aid and threaten Robin are, on the other hand, more explicit than those Brown encounters: an innkeeper, a saucy wench, and the watchman all hinder his quest, while a friendly stranger, “a gentleman in his prime, of open, intelligent, cheerful, and altogether prepossessing countenance,” gives him help and advice. Robin is, in similar fashion to Brown, involved in “a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces,” because he is in the dark about the fate being prepared for his kinsman, so that he is continually bewildered and frustrated while the townspeople are all aware of his search and his problem. His crucial moment comes as he sees Major Molineux dragged in the cart, tarred and feathered. As the psychoanalytic critics point out, it is here that he encounters and recognizes the father-figure for whom he has been searching. He joins in the demoniac laughter of the crowd; the vision sweeps out of sight, leaving “a silent street behind”; and Robin, wondering if he has been dreaming, is encouraged by his mentor to stay in the town, to profit from his experience.

The basic structure of this quest-myth is supplemented by the machinery typical of such journeys. The setting in both tales is made preternatural and foreboding by a feeling of disorientation. It is plain enough that Brown, venturing ever deeper into the wilderness, should find his surroundings sinister and confusing. But the same is true for Robin, who is traversing the streets of a little provincial capital. His is an “evening of ambiguity and weariness” like Brown's, and the byways of Boston are nearly as labyrinthine as the depths of Brown's woods or the streets of the town through which K. makes his confused way in The Castle. In the fashion characteristic of quests, the hero must be drawn out of his accustomed track in order to become psychologically prepared for the totally new experience which awaits him.

A sense of the phantasmagoric accompanies the spatial dislocation felt by each hero. The Devil's staff, as Goodman Brown sees it, “bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent.” Like the apparition of Goody Cloyse and the Devil himself, the appearance of the staff “must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.” Brown hears the minister and Deacon Gookin but can see nothing; disembodied accents are “talking … strangely in the empty air.” From overhead comes to his ears the “confused and doubtful sound of voices” out of a cloud which hurries “across the zenith” and hides the “brightening stars,” although there is no wind stirring. Yet “so indistinct [are] the sounds” that he doubts whether he hears “aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind.”⁴ Throughout the rest of the tale, Hawthorne continues to emphasize this kind of ambiguity, as he similarly provides the reader with a sense of the unreal in Robin Molineux's surroundings. Robin's disoriented sense is that of sight instead of Brown's hallucinations of hearing; the effect of dream, even of nightmare, is much the same. “Strange things we travellers see” repeats Robin, observing without understanding their meaning the preparations for tarring and feathering his kinsman, the figures hurrying along the deserted streets, the man with two faces, “as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage.” Almost falling asleep, he confuses his memories of home with this place where he now sits in weariness and frustration, and asks, most significantly, “Am I here, or there?” And when the horrid procession appears, Robin has become ready to respond to its dionysiac frenzy, in part at least because he has lost his common-sense perspective.

Both Brown and Robin have talismans: the staff which the Devil gives Brown and Robin's cudgel; they both undergo their adventures literally at night, as well as undergoing a “night-journey”; they observe and very nearly participate in what can only be called a rite, and that rite is in both cases lurid with fire against a predominant darkness; both youths come back to themselves with a start after the crisis, as if they had been in a trance or dreaming. In more than coincidental fashion Young Goodman Brown and Robin Molineux are much the same type of man involved in the same basic experience of the quest for knowledge of good and evil.

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Quests, to be sure, though archetypally the same, take many different forms: Ahab, Peer Gynt, and Sir Galahad are classic heroes of quests, but the themes and tones of their stories are in each case radically different. Quests run the gamut from philosophical tragedy to satire to light-hearted comedy; indeed if we accept the suggestion of Northrop Frye, the quest-myth is the basic pattern of which romance, tragedy, irony, and comedy are “episodes,”⁵ and it should not surprise us to find elements of the quest in any work where we wish to seek it out. Nevertheless, the differences among works built on this fundamental pattern are also important and instructive.

With “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Young Goodman Brown” these differences—or perhaps modulations would be the better word—appear in the type of adventure on which the heroes are embarked, in the specific nature of the setting, and in the character of the hero himself and the characters whom he encounters. Goodman Brown's journey is into the wilderness while Robin's is into the city. There is a kind of parallelism here, as we have indicated, in the labyrinthine and disorienting nature of Robin's city. Yet it is a much more solid place than Brown's forest. The figures Brown sees are so insubstantial as to disappear in the wink of an eye; the voices he hears may be nothing but the product of his fevered imagination; the Satanic ritual and its communicants leave not a trace behind when Brown calls upon Faith to “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.” While both tales have a dreamlike quality, Robin's world is altogether more substantial than Brown's. Essentially Brown is living in solipsism, the projection of his own tortured doubt and loss of faith. His quest is into the depths of his soul, given symbolic realization in the figures he thinks he sees and hears in the wilderness, whereas Robin's is into society. Labyrinthine though the city is, distorted and portentous as it seems to be, the city does exist, with its taverns, barbershops, churches, and crowds of people walking its streets. While it is possible to think, as Hawthorne half-encourages us to do, that Brown really has dreamed all that has happened to him, it is much more difficult to think this with Robin. When Brown comes to himself nothing remains but “calm night and solitude,” the once burning twig “besprinkles” his cheek “with the coldest dew”; when Robin recovers, the town is still around him and the kindly stranger urges him to stay where he may rise in the world without the help of his kinsman.

Evil in “Young Goodman Brown” is concentrated in the Devil, who first appears in the guise of Brown's grandfather and then in his own dark shape as he presides over the Witches' Sabbath in the depths of the forest. Robin encounters him, however, or the evil of which he is the manifestation, in several characters: the hem-ing gentleman with his indifference and his threats; the girl with the scarlet petticoat and her sexual invitation; the sleepy watchman; the man with two faces, closest to the Devil in his role as a Lord of Misrule presiding over the ruin of Major Molineux. Each of these is evil in a special way; one critic has suggested that not only is the two-faced man symbolic of the Devil, but the other characters can be seen as assistant tempters: pride, lust, avarice (in the innkeeper), and sloth.⁶ Whether we consider them this way or not, they are clearly something quite different from the radically metaphysical, the unfocused essence of evil sought by Goodman Brown. Robin is exposed not to the singular evil of the human soul so much as to the multiple evils of a social cosmos.

The characters of Brown and of Robin are also distinct, even though neither is highly individualized. Brown is a young Puritan husband—that is all we know—but Robin is described as a rustic properly prepared for his encounter with the city, clad in durable garments, with “vigorous shoulders, curly hair, well-shaped features, and bright, cheerful eyes.” Of particular interest is the emblematic staff with which Brown is equipped, a really supernatural instrument fashioned by the Devil from a maple branch plucked by the wayside, contrasted to Robin's “heavy cudgel formed of an oak sapling, and retaining a part of the hardened root”—a serviceable weapon in his forest home but useless here in the city. Several times Robin wishes he could use the cudgel to get some satisfaction from his tormentors, but in these surroundings his heavy club has no value. What he needs is something like the long, polished cane which the hem-ing gentleman strikes down before himself at every step. For Brown, who is an archetypal Everyman, the Devil's staff is a magic instrument to help him on his way toward evil; for Robin cudgel and staff are means of contending, at this time unsuccessfully, but later with probable success, against a world where one must know the “right” things to do. Like a young Madison Avenue executive, Robin needs to find out the mores of the society into which he is moving. It is a corrupt world, but apparently at the end he has discovered how to come to terms with it.

Other modulations imply this same point: the symbol of femininity in “Young Goodman Brown” is a pink ribbon, whereas in Robin's story it is a scarlet petticoat belonging to a young harlot; laughter in Brown's forest is despairing, demoniac, whereas the laughter Robin hears is mocking, derisive, contemptuous; the assembly Brown sees in the forest has undergone a change in aspect because of their spiritual alteration, the mob Robin watches seems fiendish because of their costumes and actions; when Brown turns to religion for help he asks Faith to look to heaven, Robin sees the Bible illuminated by a single ray of moonlight, a symbol, so he conjectures, of nature worshipping in “the house that man had builded.” Brown's environment is not only the solitary forest, but the solitary spirit; Robin's is the world of men.

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The reasons why Hawthorne wrote stories with so many similarities but provided them with such striking divergences must necessarily remain conjectural, yet I believe that although we cannot determine reasons some conclusions concerning results may be tentatively drawn. The first of these is that “Young Goodman Brown” differs from “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” in some of the ways that tragedy differs from comedy. Brown seems to suffer from a degree of hubris, despite his hesitancy about embarking on his journey; he acts from that peculiar combination of free will and predestination that often guides tragic protagonists; he suffers a kind of spiritual death tantamount to the physical death that overtakes most tragic heroes, although it might be noted that Oedipus, the prototypal tragic hero, suffers in much the same way in Oedipus Tyrannus.

Robin, on the other hand, has many of the characteristics of the stock comic figure of the country bumpkin, from his sturdy homemade clothes to his cudgel to his self-assurance.⁷ Naive and blundering, he prides himself on his “shrewdness,” which Hawthorne underlines with heavy irony by mentioning it again and again. He is both importunate and gullible: he tugs at the coat of the man with the cane and is threatened with the stocks for his rudeness; he thinks that the innkeeper's “superfluous civility” is due to a recognition of Robin's family resemblance to the Major; he allows himself to believe, or half-believe, that the pretty whore is the Major's housekeeper and almost falls into her toils. Despite his encounters with sinister people and frightening events, the best responses he can make are “Mercy me!” and “Strange things we travellers see!” In addition to Robin's character as bumpkin, the story itself observes some of the conventions of comedy: the youthful hero (or eiron) blocked in his search for fortune by absurd circumstances; the helpful confidant who assists the hero in his cause; the implication of his being rewarded with romance, or sex at least, as well as fortune, since the saucy eye and silvery laughter of the pretty wench are at his elbow in the climactic scene; an “assembly scene” at this climax where everyone Robin has encountered reappears; the expulsion of a scapegoat figure from the society, to the accompaniment of much raucous laughter.

Although it would be plainly a distortion to make these stories out to be a tragedy and a comedy respectively, it is clear that Hawthorne was using these orientations to create two different stories from what is basically a single plot and that consequently we see what appear to be two different possible outcomes to the same essential situation. Everyman may, by going deeper and deeper into the wilderness of the self, discover such evil there that he ever after must project it upon the world about him—Hawthorne's theme of the tragedy of moral isolation, the withdrawal “from the chain of human sympathies,” the soul seeing its sin in a hall of mirrors where the thronging terrors it perceives are only itself infinitely multiplied. Or Everyman may find himself in a society—a world of interrelated people—whom he has difficulty recognizing because of his concern with himself, until he eventually comes to a sudden revelation of his innocence, which appears absurd in these circumstances, and falls from that innocence into sophistication, an event so excruciatingly comic that he can do nothing but laugh in concert with those around him.

But although the outcomes are different, at the same time this pushing of the comic to the extreme leaves it but a hairsbreadth from tragedy so that two stories become in effect one. The tragic and comic constitute, in fact, a kind of cyclical process rather than actual antinomies; as in the universe of contemporary physics, if you go far enough in one direction, you will end up where you started. By using the archetype of the quest, Hawthorne takes us on alternate routes that turn out to have practically the same destination. In the one, man comes to grief through his own self-regard, his willful isolation; in the other he comes to grief—this time without quite realizing what is happening to him—by being absorbed into the ways of thought and feeling of a corrupt world, laughing with the mob at his previous innocence, and at the spectacle of his kinsman—the term is significant—shamed and tormented by an assemblage of demons: “On they went, like fiends that throng in mockery around some dead potentate, mighty no more, but majestic still in his agony. On they went, in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man's heart.”

Thus Hawthorne, exploring the limits of his moral universe, saw man's quest as the same, regardless of its specific form. None of his protagonists is more of an isolato than Brown; as cut off from humankind as are Ethan Brand and Roger Chillingworth, they still live in a web of human relationships. And no protagonist seems likely to rise in the social world in the way Robin indubitably will. Yet, ironically, they both are fallen. By telling us the same story and framing it so differently, Hawthorne has shown us, as in a paradigm, the themes with which he was to deal in most of his work. The ritualistic form of the quest serves him especially well in bringing his underlying idea to the fore. Probably the reason why he did not continue to provide his tales with such a clear-cut metaphor is that he intuitively (or artistically) recognized its limitations. In later work, and in other tales written about the same time as “Young Goodman Brown” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” he would turn the physical search into an intellectual or spiritual odyssey, keeping the theme but not the metaphor. Occasionally, as in “Roger Malvin's Burial” or “Ethan Brand,” a portion of the tale takes us on a quest, but the main drift is in the direction of a spiritual journey. Aylmer, Owen Warland, Giovanni Guasconti, Arthur Dimmesdale, Donatello—all are engaged in one or another kind of spiritual journey that may be taken to be the equivalent of Brown's and Robin's “actual” quests. But, with the exception of “The Celestial Railroad,” which is a special kind of satiric allegory, none of Hawthorne's other works so plainly employs the unadorned archetypal pattern of the journey from innocence into destructive knowledge.

Significantly enough, Hawthorne did not continue to find the journey into the corrupting world as imaginatively effective as that into spiritual isolation. The comic, while it appears more frequently in his work than one might think from reading some contemporary critics, is not Hawthorne's dominant mode. Even in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” it is ambiguous comedy with no joy in it and a sinister note at the climax. Probably The House of the Seven Gables has less ambiguous comedy than any other of his works, a generally sunnier attitude. But even in that novel—if it is a novel—the sinister influence of Maule's curse prevents us from feeling that all is fundamentally harmonious in this social world. Although I have claimed elsewhere that the ending of the novel, with its sudden flood of good fortune, is an integral part of the theme, the implication of the curse is still with us. Comedy is hardly Hawthorne's métier, even if he did try it on a number of occasions.

We may conclude, cautiously and with an awareness of the tenuity of our chain of reasoning, that the parallels of the stories we have been examining, together with the deviations from those parallels, were far from fortuitous in their end result, no matter what unknowable genesis they may have had. By establishing for Hawthorne the topographical frontiers of his moral territory, the polar explorations of these tales served his imagination well. If he had not undertaken such explorations, I venture to say that the assurance and artistry of his later works would certainly have been much different. In “Young Goodman Brown” he pursued the idea of isolation as far as was artistically feasible, as he followed the idea of corruption by society as far (for him) as was appropriate in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” He did not need to survey those limits again but could map the intervening territory in all its fascinating contours and complexities. As indeed, he did.

Notes

1. The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York, 1956), pp. 245-246. I have condensed Campbell's summary to some extent.

2. Although Brown's trip has been previously planned and there probably has already been contact between him and the devil, the initial encounter nevertheless has for him the authentic shock of a threshold experience.

3. Several reasons might be given for this secretiveness, among them the desire to preserve the social distance between the rustic Robin and his powerful (or once-powerful) kinsman, while at the same time preserving the blood relationship between them. The most probable explanation, to my way of thinking, is that Robin must be kept an Everyman despite his human and social relationships.

4. Cf. Paul J. Hurley, “Young Goodman Brown's ‘Heart of Darkness,’” American Literature, XXXVII (January, 1966), 410-419. His thesis is that the events all indicate Brown's hallucination, which he wills, rather than that they are ambiguously real or unreal events: “A more acceptable interpretation of the ambiguity of the story is to see in it Hawthorne's suggestion that the incredible incidents in the forest were the product of an ego-induced fantasy, the self-justification of a diseased mind. It seems clear that the incidents were not experienced: they were willed” (p. 419). I substantially agree with this position.

5. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 215.

6. Cf. Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 46n.

7. Cf. Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1961), pp. 113-125.