Narrative Structure and Theme in “Young Goodman Brown” Norman H. Hostetler One of Nathaniel Hawthorne's major themes concerns conscious aware- ness of the reality which the mind imposes on external objects. Hawthorne's characters are repeatedly confronted by the need to establish the relationship between their imaginations and the external world.! Their ability to make the epistemological distinctions between the products of their mental processes and their sense impressions of the external world frequently governs their ability to develop a sound moral relationship with other people. “Young Goodman Brown” illustrates especially well the fatal consequences of psychological misjudgment concerning perception and reality.? The prob- lem of establishing point of view is central to developing this interpretation. Although Hawthorne's narrator exists outside the story line, the tension between the conflicting interpretations of experience provided by the narra- tor and Goodman Brown from their different points of view creates the basic ironic tone of the work. From this irony, Hawthorne develops his criticism of Brown's lack of awareness of the controlling power of the mind. Recognition of this cause for Brown's behavior is essential in order to reconcile the divergent emphases that have been placed on the story. Interpre- tations have generally concerned themselves with the way in which Brown is deluded rather than with why Brown should make such serious errors in judgment or with why Hawthorne should so sharply and pervasively differ- entiate the narrator and Brown. Most critics have, of course, recognized that at least a part of Brown's experience is a “dream,” “vision,” or “hallucina- tion,” but they are more concerned with individual choice, often moral or theological (in which case Brown is a deluded individual), or with an intro- duction to knowledge, usually psychological (in which case Brown's initiation is Everyman’s).* Brown does destroy himself morally, as the end of the story makes clear, yet as Frederick Crews notes, “the richness of Hawthorne's irony is such that, when Brown turns to a Gulliver-like misanthropy and spends the rest of his days shrinking from wife and neighbors, we cannot quite dismiss his attitude as unfounded.” By differentiating the points of view of the narrator222 The Journal of Narrative Technique and Brown, Hawthorne creates (he multiple perspective necessary to validate all these critical emphases, The narrator's description of events is chitta Richard Fogle has pointed out. The “nncerta thing obscures and fuses all appearances so that it is impossible to ascertain anything objective, Fogle, in fact, does not really go far enough in discerning ambiguities, for he restricts himself mostly to the narrator's literal expressions of doubt and alternative possibilities. He accepts as fact that Brown's conductor into the forest “is, of course, the Devil,” and that Brown sees there Goody Cloyse, the minister, and Deacon Gookin, among others.” But the narrator never once tefers to them by their names. They are always described as “figures” or “forms.” Apparently, they have taken the shape of the persons whose names they use, although the evidence for this position comes only from the highly unreliable testimony of Goodman Brown and from the specters themselves---whose existence has been established only in relation to Brown's perceptions.’ and not the narrator’ Brown, indeed, is the only person to whom ambiguity is an impossibility. He is absolutely certain about these identifications, despite the fact that they become progressively more ambiguous as the journcy into the forest contin- ues. The narrator first says only that Brown “beheld the figure ofa man” (X, 75) which seems to resemble Brown's father or grandfather. But Brown, whose preceding remark (“What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!”) indicates the tenor of his thoughts, assumes at once that the figure is the devil, although he scruples against calling him such. In the next instance, the narrator's carefully restricted construction sug- gests even less validity to Brown's perception. There appears a “female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exempla- ry dame” (X, 78). The extent to which this figure can be identified with Brown's real “moral and spiritual adviser” is uncertain at best, but Brown immediately concludes that what he perceived is unquestionably Goody Cloyse, although as soon as he “cast up his eyes in astonishment,” he no longer “beheld” her (X, 79).? . The minister and the deacon do not even exist as figures, but merely as disembodied voices—the conversation is supplied only by “the voice like the deacon's” and “the solemn old tones of the minister” (X, 81). With less evidence than before, Brown assumes that he has overheard the real “holy men.” Finally, out of the rush and babble of clouds and wind, Brown fancies that he discerns the “familiar tones” of his townspeople, and particularly, “one voice, of a young woman” (X, 82). Yet Brown exhibits no doubt about jerized by the ambiguity that light" that plays over every- what he assumes he has perceived passing overhead, crying “Faith!” after his wife. ‘5 At this point appears the famous “pink ribbon,” which F,O, Matthiessen condemned as too jarringly literal to be accepted into the pattern of Brown's past hallucinations." Fogle rather lamely defends the ribbon as “part and parcel of his dream,” like everything else, and, moreover, of only momentary impact."! There is a sounder argument for its use, because Matthiessen’sNarrative Structure and Theme in“ Young Goodman Brown” 223 assumption of the ribbons literal existence is contradicted by the pattern of the expanding gap between the narrator's ambiguity of description and Brown's certainty of identification, From figures to voices to clouds to wind. the objects upon which Brown projected his certainties have become more and more vague and uncertain, This incident extends the pattern, for the narrator says only that “somerhing fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree” (my italics). Only Goodman Brown “beheld a pink ribbon” (X, 83).!? Considering the quality of his past perceptions, it would be exceedingly naive to trust his eyesight at this point. The narrator, moreover, has the last word on the subject, his insistence that Faith still wears the ribbon the next morning serving as a final ironic comment on Brown's perception of the “something.”!? The effect of this divergence of viewpoint is to establish the credibility of the narrator's perceptions and to undermine Brown's. The reader's confidence in the narrator's point of view has been reinforced by the objectivity of the unemotional tone, reflected in the cighteenth-century rhetorical patterns, '* by the candor that allows him always to present Brown in terms of the latter's current evaluation of himself, and above all by the honesty that results from his refusal to commit himself to a single-minded view of an external reality that he cannot truly know. The reader, therefore, accepts the narrator as the norm for perception against which to judge Brown, whois besct by emotional vagaries and is blind to his own motivations. Brown's expressed ideas are constantly being under- cut by his situation and actions, and yet he is absolutely certain—so certain that it never occurs to him to doubt it—that he knows what constitutes external reality. This fallacious certainty and the unconscious assumption upon which it is based provide for Brown's self-destruction. Brown's assumption is that an absolute reality actually exists, that it lies in the external world, and that it is finally knowable by man through the perception of his senses. Brown is thus an extreme Lockean in his psychology —he insists on attributing all his mental impressions to external realities which have inscribed themselves on his rabula rasa, |t never occurs to him that the source of some of his ideas may lie within himself, in his mind and imagination. Yet through the ironic tension between Brown's ideas and the perceptions of the narrator, Hawthorne has been making clear all along that the source of Brown's only significant ideas—that is, those which actually motivate and control his actions—is Brown himself. Brown goes into the forest in search of the source of evil (or sin, or knowl edge, or whatever moral or psychological term one wishes), fully contident of finding that source in some person or place —that is, in something external to himself. Since it will be external to himself, his relation to it will be subject to his own definition, limitation, and control, as suggested by his reiterated belief that he can stop his journey and turn back whenever he wishes. From the beginning, however, Hawthorne has undercut Brown's belief through the narrator's subtle insistence that Brown has carried all his ideas of evil, and therefore all the evil of which he is capable, into the forest with him. Every224 The Journal of Narrative Technique body else who enters the forest has done so, too, but Brown's psychology will not permit him to accept the analogy presented to him by his experiences, whether real or imagined. Brown's exploration of the dark forest of the mind is qualitatively indistinguishable from the one that has been experienced implicitly by all other characters in the story (including the narrator), and explicitly by Faith, who has “such dreams and such thoughts, that she’s afeard of herself, sometimes” (X, 74). But Brown refuses to recognize that evil and knowledge and their sources are intrinsic parts of all human nature. In this sense, therefore, it is finally irrelevant whether or not Brown's experiences “really” occurred. The crucial point is that Brown asserts certainty when he ought to be raising questions and doubts. The narrator notes at the very beginning that all of Brown's good intentions are postulated only in the form of future actions “With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose” (X, 75), Brown's “companion” appears to him only after he expresses his idea that “the devil himself™ might be present (X, 75). Brown exclaims that he has already penetrated “too far™ into the forest, but at the same time he way “unconsciously resuming his walk” (X, 76), The devil's arguments are so apt that they “seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor, than to be suggested by himself” (X_ 80). While “applauding himself greatly” for determining to resist the devil, Brown hears “amidst these pleas- ant and praise-worthy meditations” the sounds of the minister and the deacon (X, 80-81). If Brown had any sense of this source of his own perceptions, he might have drawn the correct analogy with the examples of innate depravity and taken his place with Faith in the brotherhood of man. His insistent assumption that all his ideas have a reality external to himself leads him instead to the wrong, conclusion, “There is no good on carth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given” (X, 83). This idea obviously fills hi ith despair, ‘so that he continues to the witches’ meeting (or unconsciously permits himself to imagine the experience), but he still has no concept of his own nature, as events at the meeting illustrate. For him, evil is still the province of the devil. that is, the source of it is external to Brown. To that error he adds his Manichacan certainty of the distinctness and absoluteness of good and evil, merely reversing his previous assumption that everybody else is good to the assumption that everybody else is bad, Once again, however, the narrator has the last word, concluding the first portion of the story with remarks that leave no room for doubt about where the source of evil really lies. Brown rushed into the heart of the dark wilderness . . . with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. ... he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors... . In truth, all through the haunted forest, there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. . . . The fiend in his own shape is less hideous, than when he rages in the breast of man. (X, 83-84)Narrative Structure and Theme in" Young Goodman Brown" — 225 The narrator also leaves no doubt about Brown's relationship to the rest of mankind: The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out; and his cry was lost ro his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert. (X, 84—-my italics) Brown does not hear his own cry for the cry around him, but the narrator hears both. Although he does not accept the idea, Brown has already joined the congregation of evil, “with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood, by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart” (X, 86). He does not need the “baptism” to experience evil but to know its nature and the way it relates him to all people. The devil stresses this point by associating the knowledge of the catalogue of “secret deeds” with the ability “to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than my power, at its utmost!—can make manifest in deeds” (X, 87—my italics). Every bosom would include Brown's. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the devil is the real hero, trying his best to awaken Brown to the reality of human nature. Hawthorne's ironic ambiguities are much too complex for that. The devil is still one of Hawthorne's numerous false guides, subtly encouraging people to extend partial truths into erroncous absolutes. Although he admits the source of evil lies in the individual human, he does all in his power to foster its development and expression, as was illustrated earlier by the kinds of assistance he had offered Brown and all his, friends and relations. Now he will succeed in securing Brown's damnation by encouraging him to refuse the baptism. Essentially, he plays upon Brown's Manichaean conviction that everybody else is totally committed to evil. If you wish to be fully human, to join “the communion of your race,” he in effect tells Brown, you too must commit yourself to evil as “your only happiness” (X, 88). That the devil lies when he says that “evil is rhe nature of mankind” (X, 88—my italics) is established by the narrator, who makes a special point of referring to the religious activities the next morning of “the good old minister” and “that excellent old Christian, tian,” Goody Cloysé, as well as to the anxious and joyful Faith (X, 88-89). Part of the irony of the characterizations may well be turned against the characters thentselves, in view of their previous night's associations, but, in any case, their holy activities are certainly no less real than’ the witches’ sabbath, and a great deal more plausible, given the total lack of ambiguity in the narrator's descriptions. But Brown has already thrown the good out with the bad. Rightly con- vinced that a conscious commitment to the idea of total depravity would be disastrous, he naively accepts the devil's explanation, which is actually only a necessary consequence of Brown's beliefs, that a commitment to the knowl-726 The Journal of Narrative Technique edge of the moral community of human beings means the same thing. By so believing, Brown throws out forever any possibility of sympathetic identifica- tion with other people, thus cutting himself off from the only way for him to test the validity of his perceptions. His rejection of brotherhood is, therefore, equally a disaster, for it is ironically based on an unconscious commitment to the concept of total depravity. It is this commitment that allows Brown (and Brown alone, as the narrator stresses) to hear only oaths, anathemas, hypoc- risy, and anthems of sin, instead of prayers, blessings, preaching, and Psalms (X, 89). The narrator insists on this ironic quality by such devices as his remark that Brown is followed “to his grave” by Faith (X, 89-90), an ironic inversion of Brown's previous belief that he would hereafter ching to Faith's skirts “and follow her to Heaven™ (X, 75). Such a commitment would have suc eded, not because Faith was “an angel on carth™ as he onginally thought, but because he would be accepting humanity ‘Thus the narrator carefully works out the culminating irony of the story, In secking to cut himself off from the evil in the external world, Brown has committed himself to the evil of his own mind, without hope of understanding or correction, Secking salvation for himself, he has committed himself to the only course that will guarantee his destruction, for only those who believe in the reality of ideas independent of sense impressions can have hope for any future except the grave, And so “his dying hour was gloom” (X, 90). One of the consequences of being aware of the nature of Brown's obsession is that the critic can no longer safely dismiss Brown at the end of his analysis as merely a deluded or even deranged person. Brown, after all, clearly retains the ability to behave acceptably in his social relationships. But he has lost the ability to transcend the external forms of these relationships and thus has lost the power to create moral relationships. Hawthorne's structure and theme imply that only through moral relationships can one create a positive human existence. Brown's failure in this regard is at once more subtle than is suggest- ed by the references to “depraved imagination” and “distorted mind”! and more universal than is suggested by the historical confinement of the problem to seventeenth-century Salem'* or even to Hawthorne's own mind.!’ Brown's problems with perception and the products of his own imagination are poten- tially those of every human being. The reader dismisses the possibility of identification with Brown only at the peril of falling into Brown's obsession —another example of the complex ironies Hawthorne leaves waiting to trap the unwary reader who fajls to recognize that it is precisely the contrast be- tween the narrator's and Brown's perceptions that allows one to accept the universality of the experience while denying the validity of Brown's response to it. University of Nebraska Lincoln, NebraskaNarrative Structure and Theme in “Young Goodman Brown" 227 NOTES 1. David W. Pancost suggests a relationship in Hawthorne's works between the uncertainty of appearances and intuitive sympathy in “Hawthorne's Epistemology and Ontology,” Emerson Society Quarterly, 19 (1973), & 13, Nina Baym also notes Hawthorne's position that “the imagination controls what people do and hence is inseparable from actuality” (The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976}, p. 33). . In Mosses From an Old Manse, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, X (Columbus: Ohio St. Univ. Press, 1974), 74-90. References made in the text will be to the volume and page number of this. edition. - Some critics do not even recognize the existence of the narrator. For example, Robert E. Morsberger asserts that “nowhere does the author intrude; such moral gencralizations as the story contains are spoken by the devil” (“The Woe That Is Madness: Goodman Brown and the Face of the Fire,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, 3 1973], 177). Perhaps Mors- berger means only the “author,” but the narrator generalizes frequently. When he does so, he usually shifts from the past to the present tense (¢.g., “The fiend in his own shape és less hideous, than when he rages in the breast of man” [X, 84—my italics]), This shift draws attention more sharply to the distinction between the narrator's point of view and Brown's. . Compare such authors as F.O, Matthiessen, David Levin, and Paul J. Hurley, who stress the former, with those whose typical concern is for the latter, such as Richard H. Fogel, Daniel Hoffman, Roy R. Male, and Rita K. Gollin: Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 282-84; Levin, “Shadows of Doubt: Spectre Evidence in ‘Young Goodman Brown,” American Literature, 34 (1962), 340-52; Hurley, “Young Goodman Brown's ‘Heart of Darkness," American Literature, 37 (1966), 409-19; Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, rev. ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1964), pp. 15-32; Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction, corrected ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 136-54; Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (1957; rpt. New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 76-80; Gollin, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 124-128 and 134-139. A minority view sees Brown. as primarily a vehicle for Hawthorne's attack on historical Puritanism. In the most detailed of these, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that Brown is representative as a culturally-conditioned victim of the Half-Way Cove- nant (“Visible Sanctity and Specter Evidence: The Moral World of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,” Essex Institute Historical Col- lections, 110 [1974], 259-99).228 The Journal of Narrative Technique 5. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 106. 6. Hawthorne's Fiction, pp. 15-32. The chief value of Fogle’s work. to which 1 am much indebted, lies in his stylistic and structural exposition of the counterbalanced ambiguity of meaning and clarity of technique. 7. Hawthorne's Fiction, pp. 17-18. 8. Levin, “Shadows of Doubt.” pp. 347-50. Not being concerned about the functions of the narrator, however, Levin accepts the reality of the devil, who in turn creates all the other spectral aspects of the story. The central question for Brown, as it was for Mather, is determining whether or not the devil had the people's consent to impersonate them (pp. 351-52). Cf. Hurley, who argues that the pervasive ambiguity necessitates the conclu- sion that none of the characters, including the devil, have any existence except as Brown's visions (“Young Goodman Brown's ‘Heart of Dark- ness," pp. 414-15), and Crews, who argues that “Browns facing embod- iments of his own thoughts in the characters he meets in the forest” (The Sins of the Fathers, p. 100). 9. To be sure, Brown's preceptor calls her “Goody Cloyse™ too. but only after Brown does. Moreover, as the story later makes clear, the reader cannot trust the devil to tell the truth either. 10. American Renaissance, p. 284. Il. Hawthorne's Fiction, pp. 18-19. 12. Cf. the use of the verb “beheld” in The Scarlet Letter, where the narrator specifically argues that the red A that Dimmesdale thought he “beheld” in the sky was primarily a product of his “guilty imagination” (V, 189). 13, Cf. Levin, “Shadows of Doubt,” who cites similar evidence to argue that the ribbon is simply another of the devil's spectres (p. 350). Critics who desire a literal alternative can provide one easily enough. For example, if Hoffman is right about the night being Halloween (Form and Fable. p. 150), then the something might as well as not bea reddish leaf falling. But the ambiguity seems firmly established without one of the narrator's usual literally expressed alternatives. Crews also notes in passing that “Brown shares Othello’s fatuous concern for ‘ocular proof" ( The Sins of the Fathers, p. 101), a concern that most definitely is not shared by the narrator. s 14, Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, p. 31. 15. Hurley, “Young Goodman Brown's ‘Heart of Darkness," pp. 411 and 16. Levin, “Shadows of Doubt,” pp. 351-52; Colacurcio, “Visible Sanctity and Specter Evidence,” pp. 289-90, 17. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers, p. 106.