Young Goodman Brown

"Young Goodman Brown"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
USA, 1846

Given the tragic events that took place in the Boston area last week, it's quite a relief for this metro Boston transplant to share a New England item of interest with you that isn't sickening or depressing or traumatizing for a change.  Rarely has an otherwise somber short story so cheered me up!  Of course, "Young Goodman Brown" isn't oppressive or gloomy from a storytelling point of view.  Not at all.  Hawthorne is in peak form throughout this c. 1700, Salem Village-set tale of the young Goodman Brown's symbolic struggle with faith and a possible late night meeting with the devil in a forest outside of town.  Three reasons why the story wowed me: 1) Loved the "modern" manner in which Hawthorne's prose playfully gussies up the more supernatural aspects of the story while leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the supernatural elements really are only conjured up in the title character's Puritan mind.  Here, for instance, we learn about a nondescript "traveller," later identified as the devil, that young Goodman Brown meets in the "dreary" forest after sunset one night: "But the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which 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.  This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light" (60).  2) The devil character, as befits his wily reputation in some circles, is a smooth talker who gets plenty of great dialogue to go along with the best phallic symbol props in the whole affair.  Given the Salem Village setting and the fact that one of Hawthorne's own ancestors is said to have presided over the witch trials at Salem, here's a choice pre-"Sympathy for the Devil" soundbite where the traveler--considering the story's suggestion that evil is to be found inside man rather than without, significantly a lookalike for Goodman Brown--introduces himself and reveals the nature of his game: "Well said, Goodman Brown!  I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that's no trifle to say.  I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war" (60).  3) Despite its economy of scale, this lean 13-page tale isn't lacking in either ambition or execution.  How else to explain the confidence of an author who can have a fiendish character convincingly declaim "Evil is the nature of mankind.  Evil must be your only happiness.  Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race" on one page (69) and then have his narrator innocently ask, "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting?" on the very next--before answering "Be it so if you will; but alas!" with a plot twist even more devastatingly laden with gloom than a supernatural ending could even hint at?  An exceptionally satisfying piece of work.

Source

"Young Goodman Brown," which should be easy enough to find online for those inclined, is the fourth piece in Hawthorne's 1846 Mosses from an Old Manse as assembled in the still lovely town of Concord, Massachusetts.  I read the Modern Library Classics edition of the work (New York: 2003, 58-70).

The House of the Seven Gables

The House of the Seven Gables (The Modern Library, 2001)
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
USA, 1851

If we can agree that the short story's like the equivalent of a 45 RPM single, the novella's the equivalent of a 12" EP, and the novel's the equivalent of an album, CD, or whatever large data storage file the kids of today are listening to their tinny, overproduced, uninteresting dance music on, then Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is very much like that mediocre second album put out by a once-great band that wowed you with their debut LP.  What happened?  While I can't blame Hawthorne for electing not to come out with The Scarlet Letter II as the follow-up release to his smash hit, I'm not sure that this wildly uneven "ghost story"/"romance" of his was really the right medium for the morality tale about the Pyncheon family curse he chose to deliver.  For starters, even in his preface he's rather heavyhanded about his didactic aims: "Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.  Not to be deficient in this particular, the Author has provided himself with a moral;--the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief;--and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectively convince mankind (or, indeed, any one man) of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms" (4).  Whatever you make of an author telling you what his story's about before you even get to the story, to my disappointment I found much of the narrative that follows just as clunky and programmatic in tone.  Maybe I don't get the guy's alleged sense of humor anymore, but his exposition-heavy passages made me grit my teeth with frequency.  Oftentimes striking descriptions shared the stage with awkward, clumsy and flat out mystifying ones like this one: "The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings" (76).  Finally, the cardboard cutout characters were a joke, especially in light of the fact that 1851 was also the same year that New England's other newest hit maker gave us the unforgettable trio of Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab.  Despite almost giving up on the book about halfway through, though, I'm basically glad I didn't because there's an absolutely fantastic chapter near the end where Hawthorne departs from his mostly boring storytelling style with a night-long vigil at the side of a key character who has just died under mysterious circumstances.  The mocking way "the Author" chides and admonishes the deceased character for over a dozen pages is a sight to behold, and for one unbelievably compelling chapter at least I felt like I was in the presence of something electric and special and "classic."  Too bad then, with apologies to our dear Hawthorne-loving friend Frances, that so much of the rest of The House of the Seven Gables is as tame and as cloying as any major label power ballad act from the 1980s only without the big hair! (www.modernlibrary.com)

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The House of the Seven Gables was read as part of a group read for R.I.P. VI.

Posts by hosts Frances of Nonsuch Book and Audrey of books as food can be found here (F) and here (A).