Short Fiction Unit

Lecture: Overview of Hawthorne and "Young Goodman Brown"

Overview of Nathaniel Hawthorne and "Young Goodman Brown"

American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne is well known for his fiction that draws on the legacy of Puritanism in the United States. The Puritans were among the earliest European colonizers of the North American continent. They left their homes in England in the 1620s and came to the American colonies to build a new society founded on a strict, "purified" interpretation of Christian doctrine. There was no formal denomination associated with Puritanism; rather, it was an approach to interpreting scripture and organizing religious devotion. Puritan culture had rigid roles for men, women, and members of the clergy which held that the physical world was rife with sinful temptations. Living a Puritan lifestyle was emotionally challenging and filled with psychological contradictions. A descendant of the early Puritans, Hawthorne was interested in exploring the challenges and contradictions of Puritanism to create stories filled with mystery and tension.

The image below is a portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne taken by photograph Matthew Brady sometime between 1860 and 1864:

Photographic Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

The bulleted list below is a brief timeline of important events in Hawthorne's life:

  • Born in Salem, Massachusetts, July 4, 1804; five generations removed from his Puritan American forebears (Bradley)
  • Moved away from Salem at the age of 12, but returned to prepare for college (Bradley)
  • Attended Bowdoin College where he made friends with Longfellow, his classmate, as well as Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce, later president of the United States (Bradley)
  • After college, lived in his mother’s Salem home, which were years of literary apprenticeship; he was an avid reader (Bradley)
  • Married Sophia Peabody in 1842, settling at Emerson’s ancestral home Old Manse (Bradley)
  • Writing initially produced meager sales, but in 1850 he published The Scarlet Letter, which made his fame, changed his fortune, and really gave to American Literature it first symbolic novel a year before the appearance of Melville’s Moby-Dick (Bradley)
  • Died at Plymouth, New Hampshire while on a walking tour
  • Legend surrounding Hawthorne throughout his life suggests that he was a shy recluse, brooding in solitude about the gloomier aspects of Puritan New England; however, Hawthorne was a decidedly public figure (Bradley)
  • Absorbed by the enigmas of evil and moral responsibility, interwoven with human destiny in nature and in eternity (Bradley)
  • Contemporaries include Poe, Emerson, Melville; he was influenced by Milton and Shakespeare (Bradley)

In his fiction, Hawthorne yielded to certain popular standards of his era. For example, he told sentimental and Gothic stories; in Hawthorne’s tales, however, moral symbolism, or the study of the soul of man, is the primary aim and is more important than the thrill of terror. From the very beginning of Hawthorne's literary career, he art was so mature that his stories may be studied without reference to their time of production (Taylor). Edgar Allan Poe -- notoriously savage as a literary critic -- admired Hawthorne's writing.

Hawthorne produced three distinct types of short fiction, which are described in the list that follows:

  1. Historical tales: Some crisis in Colonial history is treated with the freedom of the myth-maker. Hawthorne’s human characters take on symbolic value (Taylor).
  2. Moral or symbolic tales: Hawthorne employs his symbolic method to portray some enduring trait in human nature (Taylor).
  3. Pictorial sketches: Hawthorne developed this literary form, which no other writer in English has employed so successfully (Taylor).

Hawthorne's short story, "Young Goodman Brown," features the characters in the bulleted list that follows:

  • Goodman Brown
  • Faith
  • The Old Man/The Traveler – The Devil?
  • Deacon Gookin
  • Goody Cloyse
  • Goody CoryMartha Carrier

The story is set in Salem Village during the 1600s, when Hawthorne's Puritan ancestors would have been alive. The woods near Salem Village function as both a symbol and an important setting in the story, meant to indicate the difficulties of following a righteous path and the dangers of losing one's way in life.

Forest, Fog, Trees, Aesthetic, Weird

 

Important symbols in the story include the pink ribbon and the serpent staff. The bullet points below list some of the story's most important themes:

  • Community/Evil – Puritan Society
  • Loss of Innocence
  • Female Purity

Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)

 

Works Cited

Bradley, Scully. “Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864).” The American Tradition in Literature, Norton, 1918, pp. 272-74.

Brady, Mathew. "Photographic Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne." Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11558996. Accessed 6 June 2021.

de Goya y Lucientes, Franciso. “Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat).” Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18636712. Accessed 8 Jul. 2021.

Dorothe (Darkmoon_Art). “Forest, Fog, Trees, Aesthetic, Weird.” Pixabay, 12 May 2018,
https://pixabay.com/photos/forest-fog-trees-aesthetic-weird-3394066/. Accessed 6 June 2021.
 
Taylor, Walter Fuller. “IV. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864).” The Story of American Letters, H. Regnery Co., 1956, pp. 152-64.