YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN
Visible Sanctity and Spectral
Evidence: the Moral World of
Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown
Publications and Plot
• Published in 1835 (in The New England Magazine) and in 1846 (in Mosses from an
Old Manse)
The story is set in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17th
century. Goodman Brown is a young and naïve man
who’s leaving his wife of three months Faith for an
initially unknown errand in the forest.
In the dark and gloomy wilderness, he soon meets a man
who greets him as though he had been expecting him.
While they’re talking, Goodman Brown sees people he
knows to be pious walking through the forest.
Eventually he finds out that the man is the devil, and that
he’s going to be part of an evil ceremony, where many
religious people and also his wife Faith are present.
Shocked by this revelation, Goodman Brown is now sure
that there’s no good in the world, and as he pleas his wife
to resist the devil, he wakes up alone in the forest.
Goodman Brown returns to Salem, but he doesn’t trust
anyone anymore. He lives the remainder of his life in
gloom and fear.
Puritanism
• Religious reform movement in the late 16th and
17th centuries
• Purify the Church of England. Moral and
religious seriousness influencing their way of life
• Intense religious experience. Covenant
relationship with God > Holy Commonwealth
with a congregational form of church government
> only elect could vote and rule
• Problems with 2nd and 3rd generations > Half-Way
Covenant
Half-Way Covenant
Portrait of Richard Mather
• In the mid-17th century, Puritanism faced a
membership crisis: full participation was
limited to the “Visible Saints” > problems
to the children of 2nd and 3rd generations.
• 1662: a Synod accepted Richard Mather’s
idea of the “Half-Way Covenant”: children
of “partial members” could be baptized
and, with evidence of a conversion
experience, aspire to full membership.
• It had the aim to increase the number of puritans and, at the
same time, to maintain the church’s influence in society.
“ «[…] what, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already, an
we but three months married?»” [p. 85]
Witch trials
• Took place in 1692
• Strong belief in the Devil and in its activity in New England
• Importance of Tituba’s
confession
• Court of Oyer and Terminer
(to hear and to decide”.
Among the judges there was
John Hathorne) > Admission
of spectral evidence
• Superior Court of Judicature
> spectral evidence not
allowed anymore
″Tituba and the Children‶
By Alfred Fredeericks
Published in A Popular History of the United
States by W. C. Bryan
Spectral evidence
“Spectral evidence refers to a witness testimony that the accused person's
spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her witness in a dream at the time the
accused person's physical body was at another location. […]The evidence was
accepted on the basis that the devil and his minions were powerful enough to
send their spirits, or specters, to pure, religious people in order to lead them
astray. In spectral evidence, the admission of victims' conjectures is governed
only by the limits of their fears and imaginations, whether or not objectively
proven facts are forthcoming to justify them. [State v. Dustin, 122 N.H. 544,
551 (N.H. 1982)].
Witchcraft at Salem Village.
The central figure in this 1876
illustration of the courtroom is
usually identified as Mary
Walcott.
Epiphany
• It refers to any sudden, intuitive perception of or insight
into the reality or essential meaning of something.
“«My Faith is gone!» cried he, after one stupefied
moment. «There is no good on earth; and sin is but a
name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given».”
[p.91]
• Bidney’s defines it as a moment of sudden realization
that concerns also the 4 elements: fire, water, air and
earth.
His analysis of epiphany in Hawthorne’s stories focuses
on a cluster of four image-motifs that are recurrent
describing those moments: fire, flutter, fall and scatter.
Epiphany in Young Goodman Brown
• Fire: “At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by
the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some
rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit,
and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops
aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an
evening meeting. The mass of foliage, that had
overgrown the summit of the rock, was all on fire,
blazing high into the night, and fitfully illuminating the
whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in
a blaze.” [p. 92]
• Flutter: “But something fluttered lightly down through
the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young
man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.” [p. 91]
• Flutter: “Among them, quivering to-and-fro, between
gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen,
next day, at the council-board of the province, and others
which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly
heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews,
from the holiest pulpits in the land.” [p.92]
• Scatter: “Whether Faith obeyed,
he knew not. Hardly had he
spoken, when he found himself
amid calm night and solitude,
listening to a roar of the wind,
which died heavily away through
the forest.” [p. 95]
> There is no evident ‘fall’.
“Visible Sanctity and Spectral
Evidence”
• Critique by Michael J. Colacurcio (1974)
• When he goes into the forest, Brown is already “corrupted”, but
he is sure his wife can redeem him > SIN OF PRESUMPTION
“With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt
himself justified in making more haste on his present evil
purpose” [p. 85]
• How is Brow already involved into the sin of presumption? >
Half-Way Covenant
“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.” [p. 431]
“Brown would be an example of the bold hypocrite,
outrageously presuming on grace: no really
converted person ever would behave in such a
manner” [p.433]
• Goodman Brown is part of an already failing
Puritanism, also characterized by an oedipal
anxiety towards the 1st generation of ‘Saints’
“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[…] It is their reputed level
of piety which has, we are asked to imagine, being
repeatedly used to mark the level of Goodman
Brown’s own declension.” [p. 434]
Moral progress
• Beginning of the story: sin of presumption
“«[Faith] she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night, I’ll cling
to her skirts and follow her to heaven.»” [p. 85]
• Phase of distraught: loss of faith in everything and everyone
“«My Faith is gone!" cried he, after one stupefied moment. "There is no
good on earth […] Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to
frighten me with your deviltry. 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.»” [p. 91]
• Faithless desolation: his soul as the only locus of goodness in a corrupted
world
“A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did
he become from the night of that fearful dream.” [p. 95]
Dream or Reality?
“Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only
dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?.”
• 17th century approach: strong belief in the Devil and his
ability to control people > Goodman Brown actually
experiences the Sabbath > Spectral evidence
“[…] 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
spectral evidence.” [p. 437]
• 19th century approach: the figures in the wilderness are
the projection of Brown’s unconscious > Psychoanalysis
• Hawthorne’s answer to his own question is “Be it so if
you will” > it does not matter. Whether dream or reality,
Goodman Brown’s life is ruined in any case by that
experience.
“Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the
bosom of Faith, and at morning or eventide, when the
family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and muttered to
himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away.
And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave,
a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and
children and grand-children, a goodly procession, besides
neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon
his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.” [pp. 9596]
Conclusions
Hawthorne is a writer of
psycho-historical fiction, and
created tales of “how it might
have felt” to live in
Puritanism’s most troubled
years.