현대영어영문학 제60권 2호 Modern Studies in English Language & Literature (2016년 5월) 231-55 http://dx.doi.org/10.17754/MESK.60.2.231

History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

Kim, Jungmin (Seoul National University of Science and Technology)

Kim, Jungmin. “History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ ” Modern Studies in English Language & Literature 60.1 (2016): 231-55. Nathaniel Hawthorne, descendant of Puritan colonialists and member of the New England community chiefly conditioned by the Puritan heritage, was particularly obsessed with the nature and effects of sin. One of his famous short stories, “Young Goodman Brown” effectively dramatizes the neurosis resulting from committing a sin. The story has an “everyman” atmosphere, which makes Goodman Brown, with his common name, symbolic of mankind. Since the Puritan setting is basic to the story, we can expect that a variety of its thematic patterns derive from traditional Christian concepts. In addition to diverse notions of theme, other ambivalences such as alternative possibilities and multiple choices ultimately make its meanings indefinite and elusive so that it can be commonly acclaimed as one of Hawthorne’s most intriguing tales. The story whose framework seems to be quite simple is actually too complex with a lot of questions. Is Brown’s experience in the forest a dream or a reality? Does Brown lose his faith or not? Do Faith and other respectable people of Salem participate at the witches’ Sabbath? Hawthorne seems to purposely avoid answering such questions, which suggests that it is futile to examine the facts of the narrative to determine the meaning of the story. (Seoul National University of Science and Technology)

Key Words: Goodman Brown, new historicism, witchcraft, withes’ Sabbath, communion with Devil

I. Introduction

As we may readily grant that literature is primarily a form of art, we do not need to refer to Hippolyte Taine to assume that art does not exist in a vacuum. It is a creation by someone at some time in history in order 232 Kim, Jungmin to appeal to other people about some issues of human relevance. Literature is not a sphere distinct from history with which it has been closely associated. A competent literary critic will not overlook what may be called a “thick description of the historical contexts of literature” (Murfin 331). Situating a literary work historically, he/she ought to know both the history of the time when it was set and the history of the time when it was produced. Of course, he/she should not ignore the historical contexts in which we now read it, for our literary present is constituted as an imitation of a historical past. In this sense, “all acts of reading are present,” whereas “all acts of writing are past to the reader” (Colacurcio 37-38). Properly speaking, literature does not occur until someone actually reads it. While reading a literary work, we first need to be aware of its background or context. A novel will always mean much more to knowledgeable people than to uninformed ones. In particular, a historical novel is likely to be more meaningful when either its milieu or that of its author is fully understood. It is within bounds to say that our understanding of it grows in proportion to our information about the historical contexts of the world where it has been set, written, and read. Anyone who has read “Young Goodman Brown” will instantly admit its historical dimension. Writing this story, Nathaniel Hawthorne drew several events from early American history: Salem witch trials, the persecution of Quakers, and King Philip’s war. These three dark incidents were significantly relevant to Puritan colonists. During the Salem witch trials (1692-93), one of the darkest periods in American history, the villagers of Salem killed twenty-five innocent people accused of being witches. Accusations for witch-hunting were mostly based on revenge, jealousy, and other reasons that had little to do with perceived witchcraft. The persecution of Quakers in the second half of the seventeenth century was committed chiefly by Puritan settlers. Seeking freedom of religion and History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 233 economic opportunities alike, both Puritans and Quakers immigrated to America and established their own colonies. However, Puritans firmly excluded Quakers simply due to the difference of religious creeds and carried out a diversity of imprisonments and hangings. King Philip’s war (1675-76), the single greatest calamity to occur in seventeenth-century New England actually showed a series of skirmishes between Indians and colonists. Indians attacked colonists at frontier towns in western Massachusetts, and colonists ruthlessly retaliated by raiding Indian villages to win the war in the end. Besides these actual events, real persons in history such as “Goody Corey” and “Martha Carrier” who were accused of being witches during the Salem witch hunt are mentioned as well as specific locales such as “Salem [village],” “Boston,” “Connecticut,” and “Rhode Island.” Terms like “ministers,” “Deacon,” “catechism,” “elders,” “meetinghouses,” “selectmen,” and “lecture days” used in Puritan religion and government are also frequently noticed. Historical realities such as actual events, real names of persons and places, and particular terms are not at the center of Young Goodman Brown, but they lie behind and inform the main action of the story. They are realities that critics other than those historically-oriented might conceivably overlook. By including these references, Hawthorne reminds the reader of the dubious history of Salem Village and the legacy of the Puritans and emphasizes the historical roots of Goodman Brown’s fascination with the Devil and the dark side. As such, we can easily place the story of Young Goodman Brown in the seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a common setting for Hawthorne's works. To put it concretely, Young Goodman Brown is set during the Salem witch trials, for which Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather acted as a judge.1 The Salem witch trials consisted of a series of hearings

1 According to James Mellow, Hawthorne, plagued by guilt by his ancestor's role, 234 Kim, Jungmin and persecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. Although it was generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in such places as Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover as well as in Salem town. The most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem town. The episode is one of the nations's most notorious cases of mass hysteria, and has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, and false accusations. Accordingly, we need to perceive something of Hawthorne’s biographical history as well as Puritan ecclesiasticism. Hawthorne viewed his Puritan ancestors with a contradictory concept of pride and guilt. He felt pride in seeing the history of his own family interwoven with that of Salem. He was proud of their prominence and accomplishments that greatly overshadowed the declining fortunes of subsequent generations. On the other hand, he felt guilty for his ancestors’ roles both in the witch trials and in the intolerant persecution of Quakers.2 “Young Goodman Brown”, in which Hawthorne addresses the Calvinist/Puritan belief that all of humanity exists in a state of depravity, often functions as an allegory of the recognition of evil and depravity in human nature. Hawthorne, with such a genealogy, was obsessed with the nature and effects of sin. “Young Goodman Brown” dramatizes the neurosis of a wrote the story to vindicate his grandfather by featuring two fictional victims of the witch trials who were witches and not innocent victims of the witch-hunt (Mellow 60). It was also this ancestral guilt that inspired Hawthorne to change his family's name, adding a ‘w’ in his early twenties, shortly after graduating from college (McFarland 18). 2 Speaking of the witch-condemning magistrate and of an earlier Hathorne who had scourged the Quakers, Hawthorne writes in the introductory chapter of The Scarlet Letter, “I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and . . . may now and henceforth be removed” (Scarlet Letter 10). History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 235 young Puritan who is tempted by the Devil and succumbs because of his curiosity and the weakness of his faith. The story has an “everyman” atmosphere that makes Goodman Brown, with his common name, symbolic of humankind. Brown is a naive young man who accepts both society in general and his fellow men as individuals at their own valuation. As an everyman of average intelligence, Brown is striving to live a good life, but loses his faith as one of the elect in the end. As we recognize that Hawthorne built “Young Goodman Brown” firmly on his historical knowledge, the tale comes to have a sociological dimension as well as an allegorical one. Judging this young Puritan who finally loses his faith forever, Hawthorne sought to condemn that graceless perversion of true Calvinism that actually led a community to the unjust persecution of more than twenty innocent people. We ought not to underestimate his use of historical materials, even when he was writing an allegory. It is owing to the combined effect of history and allegory that Hawthorne achieved a remarkable variety of insights into human experience, working upon even an amazingly narrow range of subject matters. Most scholars and critics have generally tended to see the short story as an allegorical tale written to expose either the contradictions of or the sympathy with Puritan beliefs. Yet there have been many other interpretations of the text, as Jane Eberwein comments on the variety of explanations: "Young Goodman Brown has been presented as an allegorical revelation of human depravity, as a symbolic study of sexual initiation, as an inquiry into generational conflict, as a demonstration of Puritan hypocrisy, as evidence of Hawthorn's sympathy towards Puritan society, and even just as an artfully designed short story making no essential reference beyond itself" (Eberwein 19). A number of influential critics have written about this story from a variety of perspectives. Specifically, historical critics including Benjamin V. Franklin and James C. Keil have 236 Kim, Jungmin tackled the story, realizing that a historical story is likely to be more meaningful when either its milieu or that of its author is understood. The majority of these historical scholars, however, have tended to focus chiefly on fact- or event-oriented history without recognizing that what really happened cannot be objectively perceived. On the basis that “Young Goodman Brown” is in itself a historical artifact not only of the Puritan era the story describes but of the puritanical nineteenth-century society in which Hawthorne wrote, this study seeks to read the story “in a web of historical conditions, relationships, and influences” (Murfin 331). In the process, the social contexts in which its readers live and interpret it will be also dealt with, for the time in the new historicism is not linear, but bidirectional. As a result of seeing the story of Goodman Brown through this viewpoint of new historicism, we may glance suspiciously at our stabilized notions of what history and fiction are. This study also shows that some important historical and political realities lying behind the text may inform something significant in interpreting the short story and contributes to the verification of Hawthorne’s thought of history vs fiction.

II. Devil, Witch, and Witchcraft

The concept of a devilish presence emerged in Europe around the fifteenth century and spread to North America as it was colonized. The Devil was primarily understood as an accuser or deceiver who personifies evil and leads humanity astray. Referring to a decidedly malevolent entity possessing demonic god-like qualities, the term ‘Devil’ is often applied to Satan, an angel who fell out of favor with God and now rules over the fallen world. While mainstream Judaism contains no overt concept of the History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 237

Devil, Christianity and Islam have variously regarded it as a rebellious enemy of the Absolute. In these religions, the Devil is often seen as an allegorical subject that involves a crisis of faith, individualism and free will. In conventional Christianity, God and Satan are usually portrayed as fighting over the human souls. Over time, the idea of witchcraft became closely connected with the Devil who commanded a force of evil spirits commonly known as demons. Ingenious men should believe in witches and apparitions; if they doubt the reality of spirits, they deny not only demons, but also the almighty God. From the early medieval times, there was a widespread hysteria that malevolent satanic witches were operating as an organized threat to Christendom. Those accused of witchcraft were easily portrayed as being worshippers of the Devil, engaging in such acts as malevolent sorcery at meetings known as Witches' Sabbaths. A number of people were subsequently accused of being witches, and were put on trials for the crime throughout Europe and North America for hundreds of years. Among the best known of these trials were the Scottish North Berwick witch trials, Swedish Torsåker witch trials and the American Salem witch trials. Among the largest and most notable were the Trier witch trials (1581-93), the Fulda witch trials (1603-06), the Würzburg and the Bamberg witch trials (1626-11). Over the entire duration of the phenomenon between 15th and 18th centuries, an estimated total of 40,000 to 100,000 people were executed. The story of witchcraft accusations, trials and executions has captured the imagination of writers and artists in the centuries since the event took place. In the seventeenth-century New England, the supernatural was part of everyday life, for it was strongly believed that the Devil was active and present in the world. Puritan New Englanders including both educated people generally and uneducated folk were also convinced that witches and 238 Kim, Jungmin witchcraft were realities. Cotton Mather, one of the most learned men of the period, described about the origin of black magic in The Wonders of the Invisible World, his well-known account of the trials of several people executed for witchcraft:

The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the utmost parts of the earth for his possession. . . . The Devil thus irritated, immediately tried all sorts of methods to overturn this poor plantation. (xi)

The residents in New England had such a faith so unshakable that all the misfortunes were attributed to the work of the Devil. When such accidents as infant death, crop failures or friction among the congregation occurred, the supernatural was to be vehemently blamed. As superstitions became connected with the Devil, witchcraft persecutions had to be followed. Hawthorne knew well such lore of the Salem witchcraft delusion and decided to use them as liberally as he liked in “Young Goodman Brown.” First, Hawthorne specifically set the story in Salem Village instead of his native town, Salem, as the opening sentence reveals: “Young goodman Brown came forth, at sunset, into the street of Salem village.”3 As the “center of the witchcraft delusion,” the village is the notorious and “cantankerous hamlet” (Levin 98) in which both afflictions and accusations intensively occurred in 1692. Among the supposedly guilty and executed people of Salem Village, there were the minister George Burroughs (died on August 19, 1692) and two women Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Good (died on July 19, 1692). In Salem Village in January/February, 1692,

3 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales. Ed. James McIntosh (New York: Norton, 1987), 65. Hereafter, all the quotations of the text will be based on this edition. History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 239

Betty Parris, age 9, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, the daughter and niece, respectively, of Reverend Parris, began to have eccentric fits; they screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions. The girls complained of being pinced and pricked with pins. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical evidence of any ailment. The first three women accused and arrested for allegedly afflicting Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, and other girls were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba. The significant narrative setting helps demonstrate Hawthorne’s meditation on the question of New England witchcraft. In Young Goodman Brown, a naïve young Puritan, who strongly believes in contemporaneous issue concerning the Devil and witchcraft, realizes his potentiality for sin, and finally loses his faith in mankind including his wife. The very names of Young Goodman Brown and his wife Faith immediately suggest their roles in the tale by stimulating associations beyond those of real-life figures. The general term, “goodman” refers either to the male head of a household or to the husband himself in relation to his wife. “Goodman” was once a polite term of address, used where Mister (Mr.) would be used today. In the colonial days, it was a commonplace honorific title for a person below the class of gentleman.4 As it was usually added to the surname of a yeoman, the title of the story could mean “Young Husband Brown,” referring in part to Brown’s marital status. Adding the adjective “Young” to the title hints at something more than the protagonist’s physical age—his innocence and ignorance signifying the “vulnerability of youth” (Abel 131). Yet his last name,

4 Its female counterpart “Goodwife,” usually abbreviated “Goody,” was a polite form of address for a woman, formerly used where “Mrs.”, “Miss” and “Ms.” would be used today.“Goodman” and “Goodwife” [“Goody”] are also used as the forms of address in Arthur Miller's historical fiction The Crucible and the novels of Magnus and The Witch of Blackbird Pond respectively by George Mackay Brown and Elizabeth George Speare. 240 Kim, Jungmin

“Brown,” like its common adjective “brown,” meaning “gloomy,” seems to display the young man’s low-spirited, sedate tendencies. Obviously enough, the careful concern to call an unregenerate young man “Goodman” bears ironic overtones throughout the narrative. Hawthorne deliberately gives Brown’s wife an allegorical name, Faith, as an emblem of pure, wholesome virtue. She represents at once “an allegorical idea and the means by which the idea is inverted” (Levy 116). If Brown loses his faith in salvation, he does so in all probability by fleeing from his faith-personified wife. The couple first appears in a street of Salem Village, Massachusetts one evening near sunset sometime in the late seventeenth century. As Daniel Hoffman (81) and Michael Colacurcio (52) maintain, it must be October 31, All Hallows’ Eve5 when witches and apparitions are known to flock from all quarters and haunt people. Goodman Brown prepares to leave his home for “an errand” in the forest usually regarded as the Devil’s terrain by Hawthorne. Brown’s pretty young bride, who is “aptly named,” Faith, entreats him to postpone the “journey.” But the husband insists that it has to be performed between sunset and sunrise and ingeniously converts concern into suspicion: “’dost thou doubt me already, and we but three months married!’” (65). These newlyweds are not yet fully acquainted with each other’s minds, so this curious mood of moral crisis is to continue. For three months Goodman Brown has been married to this lovely woman symbolizing religious faith. He has not been loyal to Faith, although he fully expects to be loyal after just one more indulgence in

5 All Hallows’ Eve, which later became known as Halloween, is celebrated on the night before the Western Christian feast of All Saints' Day, November 1. The Church traditionally held a vigil on the eve when worshippers would prepare themselves with prayers and fasting prior to the feast day itself. It also initiated the triduum of Hallowmas to remember the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers. The tradition of eating certain vegetarian foods for this vigil day developed, for the Church encouraged abstinence from meat on this day, though no longer requires compulsively History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 241 violation. He surely knows that his work in the forest is an evil one, and his conscience smites him because of his disloyalty to Faith. Brown seems to have made a previous bargain to meet and accompany the Devil in the forest at night. But he feels guilty enough about his suspicious plan. Nevertheless, he is convinced that he can make this little venture with impunity. He has confidence in his ability to indulge in this wrongdoing once more and then resist all future temptations. Believing himself to be one of the elects, Goodman Brown is full of self-conceit which to him represents sin and depravity as opposed to modesty, one of the greatest virtues of Christianity. His visit to the forest is symbolic of Christian self-exploration in which doubt immediately supplants faith. He does not know in advance how far into the forest he would be persuaded to go or what the results would be. Goodman Brown believes that after this one short venture, he can safely come back home with his presumptuous confidence which finally acts as the hamartia of his own tragedy. He feels that he can do this because he believes that he firmly retains his religious faith. But in order to encounter the evil force, he must part with his Faith at least temporarily. It is here that he decidedly makes his fatal mistake. Brown desires to experience evil, not perpetually, of course, for he is, in every respect, a decent member of the church and a respectably married man. Having refused to listen to his wife’s desperate pleas, the adamant young man leaves the daylit street of Salem Village and goes into the darkening forest where most of the story takes place.

III. Forest, Territory of Devil

The forest, like wilderness, regarded by Puritans as a symbol of mistrust 242 Kim, Jungmin of their own corrupt hearts and faculties, is readily associated with images suggestive of evil. The dark, shadowy forest indicates a strange, unsettled world outside the ordered, comfortable village of untested goodness and faith. While the village may be equated with consciousness, the forest represents the dark recesses of the unconscious. Noting the hypocrisy and darkness of man’s heart, Hawthorne emphasizes the split between the conscious and the unconscious by having Brown move from the village to the forest as he follows his impulses. The forest itself is not just a simply allegorical entity, but a complex symbol in which nature, sin, and danger are richly combined. The forest also symbolizes Brown’s retreat into himself; the deeper he moves into it, the more completely he becomes one with evil. Upon entering the probably haunted forest with its atmosphere of terror, Goodman Brown soon expresses his fear: “What if the Devil himself should be at my very elbow!” (66). At that very moment he sees a middle-aged, respectable-looking man sitting under an old tree. The man carries a black serpent-shaped staff usually used along with a broomstick as a magical instrument of contracting distances. As the forest equates also with the Garden of Eden where the Tree of Knowledge grew alongside that of Good and Evil, it is not surprising that the “good man” meets the Puritan dark man—an embodiment of the dark forces that Eve encountered in the serpent. To be sure, this time the avatar is a man “in grave and decent attire” (66). The black man reproaches Brown for being late and utters that he has made his way from colonial Boston to the outskirts of Salem in fifteen minutes. His remark on his travel time and distance (perhaps sixteen or more miles) suggests that he is a supernatural being in disguise. The man will be shortly identified as the Devil himself, who seeks to lure the still-reluctant Goodman Brown to a witches’ meeting called Sabbath. History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 243

When Brown conjectures about the proximity of the Devil, it is as if the latter sprang from Brown’s very being. Thus, Hawthorne insists on the considerable resemblance between the protagonist and the Devil. Both are strikingly similar insomuch that they may be “taken for father and son” (66). The Devil seems to be, in short, “Brown’s own alter ego, the dramatic projections of a part of Brown’s psyche” (Guerin 140). We are informed not only that Goodman Brown looks like the Devil, but that so do his father and grandfather. Due to the resemblance of three generations, the Devil appears to be no other than “Brown, father, grandfather, all rolled into one, the exact counterpart of Faith, Brown’s heavenly side” (Walsh, Jr. 68). This family identification with the Devil becomes fundamental in understanding the Puritan doctrine that all men are depraved by nature. The first people mentioned with reference to sin are also his father and grandfather. When he wants to break his covenant with the Devil and return to his wife, Brown argues that he would be the first among his clan members to get involved in evil forces. Then the fellow traveler interrupts to present the historical and familiar records straight. He shocks the young man by telling him that his ancestors were religious bigots, cruel exploiters, and practitioners of the black magic—in short, full-fledged collaborators with the Devil. Goodman Brown himself must have already known the facts concerning the persecution of the Indians and the Quakers committed by his forebears. In this regard, we can see that the misdoings of Brown’s father and grandfather were originally attributed to William and John Hathorne in Hawthorne’s genealogy. These two ancestors of Hawthorne make their first appearance as fictional characters in “Young Goodman Brown.” Hawthorne’s great-great-great grandfather William Hathorne, like Brown’s grandfather, participated in such persecutions of Indians and Quakers, leading two 244 Kim, Jungmin hundred Indians into slavery in consequence of his victory in King Philip’s war and ordering Ann Coleman and her Quaker friends whipped in the streets of Salem, Boston, and Dedham. On several occasions, Hawthorne described the appalling scene of this Quaker woman’s persecution, and here is a well-known passage from “Main-Street”:

And there a woman,—naked from the waist upward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the Main-street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a whip of knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is that constable; and each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you see a frown wrinkling and twisting his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon his lips. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfil the injunction of Major Hawthorne’s warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. There came down a stroke that has drawn blood! (70)

As magistrate and major, William Hathorne enjoyed his powers and distinctions “like a bloodhound” (Miller 21), but he doubtlessly performed such deeds in order to establish a society of justice. Hawthorne’s great-great grandfather John Hathorne was one of the most notorious judges in the days when people believed that witches were real and nothing caused more fear in the Puritan community than people who appeared to be possessed by a devil. He finally became known as “one of the hanging judges” (Bromwich 152) for sentencing witches to death. Both of these ancestors had a distorted view of typical Puritans, like that of Jonathan Edwards, that their deeds were entirely performed in the service of their God, who was a vengeful deity that placed obedience over mercy. In brief, Hawthorne converted these two pillars of the patriarchal Puritan world into substitute father figures in “Young Goodman Brown.” After revealing the wickedness of Brown’s ancestors, the diabolic companion tries to persuade the young man to attend the Sabbath, saying History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 245 that his father and grandfather have also done so as well as political and religious celebrities of New England whose lives are uncorrupted on the surface. Nevertheless, Brown tries to refuse his companion’s proposal. However, he feels confused when he sees old Goody Cloyse,6 who years earlier taught him his catechism, on her way to the meeting. Being on familiar terms with the Black Man, his former teacher complains that her broomstick was probably stolen by the witch Goody Cory.7 Brown is somewhat shaken, but he is still inclined to turn back and save himself. He is then faced with a still harder test. Just as he congratulates his own moral victory for a short while, he is further disconcerted by hearing the venerable minister and Deacon Gookin riding through the forest on the same errand. In his naivete, Brown begins to suspect the respected members of the community until Goody Cloyse, Deacon Gookin, the parson, and even Faith herself are finally disclosed as all creatures actually in league with the demon. When Goodman Brown is about to look up at the sky and pray with his hands lifted, a mass of black cloud rushes across the sky. At that instant, he hears the voices of various people he knows in Salem, including that of his wife, Faith. Though Goodman Brown usually admires the pious Goody Cloyse, the minister, and Deacon Gookin as his spiritual guides, his wife is an even more important representative of the moral force. In fact, they are the four people in Salem Village whom Brown regards as reliable sources of morality. It seems obvious that their respectability must be destroyed before Goodman Brown can fully commit himself to an evil cause of the world. The dreaded moment of destruction

6 A character modeled on Sarah Cloyse who was accused as a witch and examined by Judge John Hathorne, a central figure in the Salem witch trials. But she was not indicted by a grand jury. 7 A character modeled on Martha Cory who was hanged as a witch on September 22, 1692. 246 Kim, Jungmin at last arrives with reference to his wife. He shouts her name and she screams; at that very instant, one of her pink ribbons flutters down. Holding it for a moment, Brown cries out: “My Faith is gone. . . . There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come Devil; for to thee is this world given” (71). The shock that Goodman Brown suffers here is awfully instantaneous and devastating. As a devoted religious man, Goodman Brown acknowledges Calvin’s theory of human depravity. Despite an extensive and complex theology of Calvinism, some fundamental tenets of Calvinism may illuminate the story of Goodman Brown. Calvinism stresses the sovereignty of God—in goodness, power, and knowledge, and correspondingly emphasizes the helplessness of man. Since the Fall of Adam, man has been innately and totally depraved. His only hope is in the grace of God, who alone is sovereign enough to save man. And the most notorious, if not chief, doctrine of Calvinism is predestination based on the belief that God has, before their creation, selected certain people for eternal salvation, others for eternal damnation. Appearances are therefore misleading; an outwardly godly man might not be one of the elect. Thus it is paradoxical that Goodman Brown is so shocked to learn that there is evil among the apparently righteous. After this crisis, the turning point, the rest of the story emphatically declares in succession Goodman Brown’s surrender to evil. Throwing away all further qualms, Brown stoutly rejects the good he has looked for and hurries through the forest after the Devil. The haunted forest appears horrible to Brown, but he is himself more like a devil than like a man: “there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown.” After all, Goodman Brown, “himself the chief horror of the scene” (71), rushes, blaspheming loudly and roaring with demonic laughter. History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 247

IV. Communion with Devil

Brown’s destination is the witches’ Sabbath, known to be “one of Hawthorne’s most memorable dramatizations of man’s recognition of evil” (Hoffman 82). The black conclave represents the highly organized coven of a sect that threatens the Christian commonwealth with destruction. The witches are said to be content neither with a personal malice nor with an individual’s solitary compact with the Devil, their acknowledged priest and leader. They hold services that horribly and blasphemously parody Christian rites. According to Richard H. Fogle, the communion of sin is indeed “the faithful counterpart of a grave and pious ceremony at a Puritan meeting-house,” in which the Devil plays a role of “some grave divine” (40). The witch meeting is held at a firelit clearing. Flanked by glowing pines, a protruding rock is used as an altar or a pulpit in which something akin to a baptismal font contains water, fluid flame, or blood. If it is the blood, it symbolizes not only baptismal imagery but the Holy Grail, the vessel that has been said to contain the blood of Christ at the Last Supper. The imagery of fire is typically used by Hawthorne to connote intense emotion, especially sexual passion. The coven of the Prince of Darkness is crowded with all the worthies as well as the wicked people of Salem. At the call of this black minister, “Bring forth the converts!” Brown steps forward. Next led by both Goody Cloyse mentioned above and Martha Carrier, the “rampant hag,” who received “the Devil’s promise to be queen of hell” (73), his wife, Faith approaches the congregation to his amazement. Brown and Faith are led to the altar, where the Devil, in the guise of a Puritan minister, gives the speech welcoming them to the diabolical Sabbath: “Welcome, my children to the communion of your race. . . . Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must 248 Kim, Jungmin be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race” (74). And then the dark figure exposes in detail the sexual crimes of their decent neighbors. We can readily acknowledge that the main materials of “Young Goodman Brown” have been drawn from Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World, published the year following the Salem witchcraft trials, in which Mather described the Devil as a “small black man” (Mather 37) to lure people to forest rendezvous where church sacraments were imitated and mocked. Martha Carrier was suspected as a witch and hanged in 1692, and Cotton Mather cried out at her hanging, “This is the hag whom the Devil promised to make Queen of Hell” (Mather 103). Here we can make sure that Hawthorne indeed quotes Cotton Mather verbatim in describing Martha Carrier. As the congregation welcomes the neophytes to the communion of sin, their initiation into the evil community adopts the form of baptism more vividly: “Herein did the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads” (74). The forest ritual is, in fact, a perversion of mass. Instead of being a demonstration of God’s love for man, it is the Devil’s mass described also by Cotton Mather in his “Hortatory and Necessary Address,” a section of his Wonders of the Invisible World: “These Witches. . . have met in Hellish Rendezvouses, wherein the Confessors do say, they have their diabolical Sacraments, imitating the Baptism and the Supper of our Lord” (Mather 37). Just as orthodox mass is a ritual involving congregation and priest, so does the forest conclave have a cluster of unholy worshippers presided over by a diabolical minister. At just the moment when the “mark of baptism” by blood is about to be put on the couple’s foreheads by the “shape of evil,” Brown cries out to save himself and Faith. The prospect is too much for Brown, and at this eleventh hour, he makes his final decision to reject History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 249 evil. Crying out in agony and terror, “Faith! Faith!,” Brown orders her to “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one” (74). Instantly the phantasmagoric tableau vanishes, and he finds himself alone in the dark forest. Hawthorne tells us that Goodman Brown never knew “Whether Faith obeyed” (74) his anguished crying. This evasive statement leads us to induce in earnest the author’s involvement in “a deliberate withdrawal from a verdict on what happened” (Guerin 97). Hawthorne poses an intrinsic question as to Brown’s experience in the forest: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting?” In response to his own query, Hawthorne promptly replies that it does not matter: “Be it so, if you will” (75). This is the vaguest of all the equivocations scattered throughout the tale. Since Hawthorn himself intentionally avoids the clear answer, it is futile for us to attempt to answer it. Possibly resisting a declaration about Goodman Brown’s forest expedition. Hawthorne seems to choose the elusive strategy to suggest that the tale’s meaning cannot be determined by the narrative itself in spite of its seemingly attempting to answer the query about Brown’s experience in the forest. Instead Hawthorne allows the reader to accept the possibility of a dream if he is so inclined. At last Hawthorne hands over the choice between dream and reality to the reader. Notwithstanding, it may be unnecessary to seek to choose between interpreting the story literally and taking it as a dream. The author’s question above actually corresponds to whether Goodman Brown, Faith, and the other residents of Salem Village were really present at the gathering place. Hawthorne offered an alternative possibility not only to the nineteenth-century readers who refused to take devils seriously even in historical fiction but also to the modern readers of this scientific age. There is no reason to suppose Hawthorne’s contemporaries believed in 250 Kim, Jungmin devils any more literally than do we ourselves in the twenty-first century. Thus, regardless of the times, those who consider Goodman Brown’s experience in the forest as a reality tend to believe that he is a victim of the evil world in which he finds himself. Such an interpretation makes Hawthorne more pessimistic than he was usually thought to be. On the other hand, those who see Brown’s experience as a dream put the responsibility for his despair, not on the world, but on him. Judged by this quite deliberately ambiguous strategy, Hawthorne probably recognizes that our waking life is closely bound to the world of dreams. Whereas life is like a dream in its revelation of terrifying truths, a dream resembles the life in its reflection of unattainable visions. Hawthorne’s point can be understood as a paradox that “the truth conveyed in the dream . . . is also a truth of waking experience” (Levy 116). Just as there is no distinct barrier that separates between history and fiction in the view of new historicists, so there is no definable boundary line between fact and dream. It is because the new historicists tend to “wonder whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely and objectively known” (Murfin 332-33). What actually happened in the forest must remain, as Hawthorne chooses to put it, a question. Yet just what happens after Goodman Brown emerges from the forest is obvious enough. The denouement of Goodman Brown’s story comes quickly. Brown returns the next morning to Salem Village. The tone of the paragraph describing his return to the village is strikingly direct and forthright. The dreamlike description of Brown’s adventure in the forest is superseded by the purposefully blunt narration. Life proceeds in the village as it always has. Only Goodman Brown has changed, and he is never at peace with himself again. Nor is there any change in anyone else. The minister seeks to bless Goodman Brown, but the young man shrinks away from him. Deacon Gookin prays likewise, but Goodman Brown still thinks him a wizard. Goody Cloyse recites the History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 251 catechism to a young girl, and Goodman Brown snatches the child away from the old woman’s arms. He goes as far as to pass his wife, Faith, in the street without a word. Brown’s rejection of the greeting of Faith implies that he has lost faith and rejected the fundamental tenets of Puritanism during the course of the night. Faith is symbolic of Brown’s faith, which he gradually loses as he doubts more and more the existence of any goodness in mankind. His deeds mean that he now doubts that anyone is good—his wife, his neighbors, the officials of church and state. Goodman Brown sees evil wherever he looks. He remains full of cynicism and moral skepticism, which are not his sin but merely its terrible effects, until he dies. Goodman Brown is so blinded by perception of evil that his life is ever after blighted. Becoming a totally changed person, that is to say, “a walking guilt complex” (Guerin 141), Brown is always burdened with anxiety and doubt. Being taken beyond the point of return, he can never again see man’s goodness as valid. Goodman Brown’s sin is not definitely identified throughout the tale, but its horrible effects are most impressively described. His dying hour is gloom. In brief, through the rest of his long life, Goodman Brown lives an unhappy life, believing that all men are depraved and religion is a sham. When he dies as a despairing man, no hopeful epitaph is to be engraved upon his tombstone.

V. Conclusion

“Young Goodman Brown” is an autobiographical story8 of sorts of a

8 The story is told almost consistently from the viewpoint of the title character; the reader sees everything through the protagonist’s eyes except for one passage: “So saying, he threw it [the staff] down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take cognizance” (69). 252 Kim, Jungmin young Puritan man in place of Hawthorne. It has been usually known as an allegory—what Hawthorne possibly meant, especially when he proposed that it might have been a dream, because an allegory is a fictitious story designed to teach an abstract truth. Goodman Brown is supposed to be Everyman, with whom the audience or reader can identify easily. Even though Hawthorne implied that Brown’s problem is that of Everyman, he did not mean that all men share Brown’s fate. Hawthorne himself did not adhere to the black pessimism that finally comes to Brown after a night’s stay in the forest. Hawthorne affirmed that evil impulses visit every human heart, but he could scarcely believe that most men are mainly evil or that most men shift any amount of their evil impulses into evil deeds. Although the reader can never know what actually happened in the forest, he must be sure of the consequences of Goodman Brown’s despair as a result of his questionable act in the forest. Brown cannot distinguish between appearance and reality in everyday life, taking people and things simply at face value. If a man looks virtuous and pious, Brown assumes that he is. And if the man turns out to be wicked, Brown’s every standard crumbles. Since the respectable minister, political and religious officers, and even his wife are discredited, he has no choice but to become a cynic and a misanthrope. The Puritan setting of “Young Goodman Brown” is basic to the young man’s story, for some of its thematic patterns derive from traditional Christian concepts. First of all, Hawthorne has a command of peculiar diction and colloquial expressions, given the language of the period contributed to the enhancement of the setting. In addition, Hawthorne uses literary techniques such as specific dates and particular personal names or places in history. Hawthorne suggests within the narrative in effect that the story takes place in the days of “King William” who reigned as William III from 1688 to 1702. Other evidences of its time are the references to History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 253 the persecution of the Quakers and King Philip’s War. The story of Young Goodman Brown is so thoroughly set in colonial New England that there is small wonder if such local history was indeed “Hawthorne’s true métier” (Colacurcio 37). Hawthorne’s interest in historical particularities had its own unique characteristics in comparison with the universalism of contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In this respect, it is no wonder that Hawthorne has often been called a “deeply American writer” (Kaul 1) or referred to the “father of the American novel.”9 The proposed themes of “Young Goodman Brown” are diverse: the reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil, the inherent fallibility of man, the risk of curiosity, and the results of doubt or moral skepticism. In addition to these various themes, other ambiguities such as alternative possibilities and multiple choices ultimately make its meanings indefinite and elusive so that “Young Goodman Brown” can be commonly acclaimed as one of Hawthorne’s most difficult tales. At least, Hawthorne’s strategy of ambiguity or equivocation plays a part in making it as one of the intriguing stories Hawthorne ever wrote. According to Richard P. Adams, “Young Goodman Brown” contains “the germ of nearly all his best work to follow,” and it is not too much to say that “The Scarlet Letter or The Marble Faun is only “Young Goodman Brown” grown older and bigger” (Adams 54). It may be also fairly said that it is at least partly owing to “Young Goodman Brown” that Hawthorne has had a great impact on American writers in succession until now.10 The fact that we frequently refer to “Young Goodman Brown” as an excellent short story but do not agree on many aspects of the work means that it will continuously have a

9 For more detailed discussion of this subject, see Ji-won Kim (29-51). 10 For example, Stephen King refers to the story as “one of the ten best stories written by an American,” calling it “his favorite story by Hawthorne” and citing it as “an inspiration for his O. Henry award-winning short story, ‘The Man in the Black Suit’” (King 69–70). 254 Kim, Jungmin lot of layers to be peeled away, which is enough to indicate that our own reading is also historically determined.

Works Cited

Abel, Darrel. The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne’s Fiction. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1988. Print. Adams, Richard P. “From Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales.” Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1968. 54-62. Print. Bromwich, David. “American Psychosis.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2005. 135-60. Print. Colacurcio, Michael J. “ ‘Certain Circumstances’: Hawthorne and the Interest of History.” New Essays on Hawthorne’s Major Tales. Ed. Millicent Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 37-66. Print. Eberwein, Jane Donahue. “My Faith Is Gone! ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and Puritan Conversion.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. Ed. Harold Bloom. Delaware: Chelsea, 2005. 19-31. Print. Fogle, Richard H. “Ambiguity and Clarity in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1968. 31-44. Print. Franklin, Benjamin V. “Goodman Brown and the Puritan Catechism.” ESQ 40 (First Quarter 1994): 67-88. Print. Guerin, Wilfred L. and Others. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Harper, 1979. Print. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Main-Street.” The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne 11. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1974. 49-82. Print. ______. The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne 3. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1964. Print. ______. The House of the Seven Gables. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne 2. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1965. Print. ______. The Scarlet Letter. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne 1. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962. Print. ______. “Young Goodman Brown.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales. Ed. James History vs. Fiction: A New Historicist Reading of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown 255

McIntosh. New York: Norton, 1987. 65-75. Print. Hoffman, Daniel. “Just Married!—In the Village of Witches.” Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1968. 80-95. Print. Kaul, A.N. “Introduction.” Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966. 1-10. Print. Keil, James C. “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’: Early Nineteenth-Century and Puritan Constructions of Gender.” The New England Quarterly 69 (March 1996): 33-55. Print. Kim, Ji-won. “Hawthorne as Father of the American Novel.” American Novel 12.1 (2005): 29-51. Print. King, Stephen. Everything’s Eventual. New York: Pocket Books, 2007. Print. Levin, David. “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” American Literature 34 (1962): 344-52. Print. Levy, Leo B. “The Problem of Faith in ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Modern Critical Views: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 115-26. Print. Mather, Cotton. The Wonders of the Invisible World. 1693 Edition. From Electronic Text: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=etas. McFarland, Philip. Hawthorne in Concord. New York: Grove P, 2004. Print. Mellow, James R. Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980. Print. Murfin, Ross C. “What Is the New Historicism?” Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. Boston: Bedford Books, 1991. 330-44. Print. Walsh, Jr., Thomas R. “The Bedeviling of ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown.” Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1968. 63-69. Print.

김정민 주소: 서울특별시 서초구 나루터로 4길 39 이메일: [email protected]

논문접수일: 2016. 03. 31 / 심사완료일: 2016. 04. 25 / 게재확정일: 2016. 05. 04