Demonic, Parodic and Young Goodman Brown

1. Why do I like Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"? Because the story reminds me of those many stories, now unremembered in detail and name, which turned up in the old E.C. Comics, on such TV programmes as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and even Star Trek, and which deal with the weird edges of unconscious experience in which the familiar people and places of our waking life appear in parodic forms of themselves. The story also brings to mind Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street where the dream world is a dangerous place. I think I like this kind of story because it is so foreign a form to me. I mean 'foreign' in the sense of unfamiliar. Goodman Brown's experience, horrific as it is, is possibly a dream experience, and dreams are a part of my life I rarely, if ever, touch. From what those who know these things tell us, all of us dream; I, however, cannot recall my dreams. Reading "Young Goodman Brown," I wonder whether this psychic mechanism of dream amnesia is fortuitous, a form of gloom management. Are my dreams so unspeakable, so unrememberable because they depict desires as wicked as those of Goodman Brown? Frankly, I don't know and I don't care to know. I would rather share the dreams of a Goodman Brown than my own, if these are similar.

2. Perhaps this resistance on my part to my own dreams explains another difficulty I have: entering a fiction in a visceral way. I rarely have what I suppose to be an emotional response to story. Well, this is true to a point; obviously I like some things more than I like others, and also obviously this is because some stories speak to me more powerfully than others. The truth is that poems speak to me more intensely than stories. When I like stories, the reason is usually attached to a poetic element in the story. In the case of "Young Goodman Brown," I react to the story's language. Hawthorne invests his prose with the intensity of poetry. Why I should like this, is unclear to me, although I suppose this is my substitute for ritual and ceremony. I have no interest or liking for the usual rituals of our culture, but I do react more strongly to the forms of literature--what I here refer to as its ritual power--than to its content. But this too is probably not entirely genuous.

3. I guess that Hawthorne has tapped into something universal in this story. That is, he not only presents material which is quintessentially American--an expose or a satire on the Puritan ethos--but he also enlarges on what is distinctly historical and Puritan to give us insight into the workings of human desire. In other words, I don't think the story depends upon the reader having knowledge of its historical dimensions. It may be appreciated for its internal structures. From the beginning, this story sets up a contrast between male and female--the male is about to depart from home, while the female (and wife) remains homebound. Male desire takes the man on a journey into the depths of consciousness and of experience. But what is it that the male desires? Well he desires everything he does not have, everything he lacks: knowledge, the power to transgress, to break away from all that restricts such as home, community, and personal history. That this is the perennial quest of the male is indicated by references of one kind and another to Goodman Brown's father and to his grandfather. It is the son's destiny to desire release from the wearying and uncanny repetition of the father's lot. Ironically, however, his journey away from home, away from his origins, away from the maternal (whether mother or wife) can lead only into the father's footsteps. And recall the father's relationship with the mother. In other words, what the son quests for is the mother. His journey into the forest, at night, to find a demonic and parodic ceremony redolent of snakes, phallic staffs and trees, flames, and fatherly encouragement to accept the authority of wicked power structures, is a journey into the law of the father. Goodman Brown is doomed to repeat the journey of his father and of his father before him.

4. If this sounds as if Goodman Brown is trapped, that's because he is; Goodman Brown is caught in the necessary repetition of male desire. He cannot think his way--either in consciousness or unconsciousness--out of a belief in power structures. He cannot think his way out of male modes of thought. Either he accepts the invitation of the devil to take part in the wickedness of the world's sexual, social, and political tyrannies, or he retreats into a world of gloom in which he perpetuates individual need for power anyway. Either way, he is doomed to fail because what the mind wants--fulfillment--is beyond reach. Fulfillment is beyond reach precisely because to be fulfilled is to establish oneself in a place where language is no longer necessary, where experience is one of unity rather than uniformity, and where separation from others is no longer. The journey to the forest is the demonic version of this fulfillment. Brown descends into a dark, enclosed space where initiates into the ways of wickedness appear unified by laughter and by the ceremonies of desire. This is, of course, a false laughter and a false desire.

5. The only way for Goodman Brown to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of group power or individual power (social conformity or solipsistic projection) is for him to embrace Faith at the beginning of the story, to stay home in compliance with her wish. So as you can see, I don't read this story in any theological, spiritual, or religious sense. Rather I read it psychologically. The story is for me a powerful reminder of the mind's workings. We might, if we so desired, read the story from a Jungian point of view and see Faith as Goodman Brown's anima forever split from him by his failure to overcome selfhood as manifested in the Shadow figure of the elder man, the devil, the demonic father. Finally, all I am really saying in this brief exercise is that I find stories which use such psychologically charged images as the forest, the father, the fire, the anima, the crone, the shadow, the journey, the underworld experience, and so on powerful.

6. I also like Hawthorne's refusal to be clear on such things as dream and reality, truth and falsehood, and narrative position. This story seems plain enough on the surface: for some mysterious reason newly married Goodman Brown has agreed to meet an elderly man in the forest; he leaves his wife to fulfill his agreement; he meets the elderly man and walks with him for a while; then he walks by himself seeing familiar people in unfamiliar circumstances until he arrives at a strange place in the woods where a kind of black mass is being celebrated. Here Goodman Brown sees his wife Faith; the vision prompts him to stop his slide into wickedness. The whole thing seems a dream, but Goodman Brown takes it as a reality and his days are herafter darkened. Was it a vision or a dream? What does the whole thing mean? How did Faith get into the forest? Was Goodman Brown's mother there? Was the old man the devil? These questions and more beg to be asked, but answers remain, for me, elusive. I like stories that leave more questions unanswered than answered. I like stories that remain uncanny, mysterious, open-ended, incomplete in the sense that they refuse simple reduction to paraphrase. I don't mind living with doubts and uncertainties. Goodman Brown is a person who needs certainties and look where that need leaves him.