The Prerequisites for Symbolism Literary Movement and Its Fruits - Assignment Example

Symbolism as a movement in poetry and other form of literature started in late ninetieth Century. It was a reaction to realism and naturalism. It is said to have started in France as an art movement and in Belgium as a literary movement especially in poetry. Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleures do mal or Flowers of evil, a literary work dating back to 1857 is supposed to be the starting point of this literary movement. Symbolism provides every written text with a subtext too. The use of the words or descriptions or the presence of different objects attains deeper and higher levels of meanings in symbolic writing. This extended meaning transforms the whole body of the written word into a very powerful expressive instrument. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “young Goodman Brown”, (1835) is a typical short story that is a perfect example for how a short story can be expressively symbolic. The whole story is allegorical with not only the characters or their dialogues but also concrete items symbolizing abstract ideas. Objects as well as characters that people the story are used for symbolic expression of another meaning. Thus the text of the story attains many levels of meanings and there are many meaningful subtexts with in the text of the story. The protagonist of the story the Goodman Brown and yet another main character of the story, Faith his wife, are themselves symbolic representations. The very names of these characters represent their personalities symbolically. “With Heaven above and Faith below I will stand firm against the devil!’ cried good man Brown.” Is a famous quote from the short story. This quote brings out the symbolism in the names of the two characters. Goodman Brown is a good man, because he wants to fight the bad devils. He declares his faith in God which he believes will give him strength to fight the devil. Faith who got married to Goodman Brown only recently, is a faithful wife. She has great faith in God and goodness. She always tries to pull her husband out of the temptations to go the Devil’s way. The story starts at dusk in the village of Salem. Salem is in Massachusetts and the story’s ambience or background is the community of puritans who are all god-fearing. Goodman Brown has decided to go to the forest that night to attend witch’s Sabbath. But Faith as a faithful wife, tries to pull him off the path of sin by requesting him to postpone his journey till next day morning. Thus both the main characters on the very onset of the story turn out to be symbols, with higher levels of meaning. Goodman Brown is a good man but tempted by forces of sin, may be out of curiosity. Faith, his wife has so strong faith in herself and God that she is not tempted at all. More over as a faithful wife she is trying to stop her husband from going to the path of sin. She attains more symbolic meaning as the story progresses and should be considered as the strongest symbol in the story. Anyway, Faith fails to make Goodman Brown postpone his trip to the forest. He kisses her goodbye and starts his journey into the forest The motif of Goodman Brown’s journey into the forest also has a symbolic meaning. The author doesn’t make that motif explicitly clear. This lack of clarity regarding what forced Goodman Brown to undertake the journey is what echoes out as a symbol in the minds of the readers. Goodman Brown might have got motivated by sheer curiosity. He might have become curious about the meeting of devils in the forest, the rituals they might perform around a blazing fire as one would imagine the scene to be. Or it could be the adventurous mind of Goodman Brown that forced him to embark upon the journey into the forest to face the challenges the forest posed. He might have decided to adventurously face the devils in the forest too. Thus every man/ woman is under the pressure of temptations to travel through, out-of the way- paths, which Christianity and Puritanism of religion considered the paths of sin. The temptation of Goodman Brown to go to the forest, even by negating the words of his faithful wife, also represents the symbolic temptations with in every human being to go the way of the sin. In modern civilization we call it adventure. But in the old world religion it represented and symbolized the bad forces pulling good men towards them. The good men gets adventurous thinking that they can go to the dark forest-like world of sin and comeback untouched by the forces of evil. But they get lost in the forest and can never be the same again as the story of Goodman Brown tells us. The untold mental state of the main character gets a symbolic meaning thus. He sets off by sunset. This light and the mood are symbolic again. The light and darkness are archetypal or primordial symbols. They were symbols in all times. To quote Robert B. Ewens: “Emergence of the self is signaled by archetypal symbols that express wholeness, completeness and perfection. Such a symbol often takes the shape of a circle (Mandala after the Sanskrit word for “magic circle”.) and may appear in dreams.” (An Introduction to Theories of Personalities, PP 71.) Light is perceived by all human beings with a uniform meaning. It is the symbol of joy, glory, happiness, truth, optimism, goodness and God. In contrast darkness symbolizes gloom, unhappiness, falsehoods, evil, lack of hope and devilishness. So the time of his starting of the journey and the fading light as he continues his journey is symbolically important and emotionally expressive too. Going back to Robert Ewens quote again, this symbol of light and shade is working like a circle here. The journey starts when the sun is setting. The bright sun of God and goodness is setting in his mind. As the journey continues the light goes fading off and off. He enters into darkness as the journey progresses. He enters into devilishness and godlessness. The dark, tangled ways and lack of visibility become the symbolic representations of the loneliness and confusions of a godless soul. This journey of the protagonist will appear like a dream too, when the short story ends. So one has to repeat the earlier quote from Robert Ewens, about primordial symbols, common in dreams. Another symbolic character is the mysterious man whom the Goodman Brown meets during his journey through the forest. He has a staff resembling a snake. This staff is a symbol that will start defining the character of the man. The staff resembling a snake makes him look like a devil figure. Serpent or snake is one of the oldest symbols of mythology with intercrossed meanings, positive as well as negative. In this short story which has communal ambience of god-fearing puritan life in the village of Salem in Massachusetts, the snake can only assume the status of a negative symbol, a negative symbol of deceit. Remember it was the snake of deceit that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, according to the Book of Genesis. The devilish man is also a bad figure of temptation, tempting Goodman Brown to continue his journey through the forest. Very often Brown expresses his desire to go back to his home, to go back to his faithful young wife. But in the presence of the devil man his feet go on taking him up the path of darkness in the forest. Thus the devil and Goodman together symbolizes the easily corruptible human nature. The Christian and the puritan theology emphatically points at an omnipresent devil that can corrupt the human mind very easily. It is only the faith in God that keeps the devil away. This symbolic meaning becomes explicit in the initial conversation between the devil man and Goodman Brown. Devil asks Brown why he was late. His answer is that “Faith kept me back awhile.” (The Young Goodman Brown, PP 404). The word “Faith” assumes two meanings here--- the name of his wife as well as the faith in God. All attempts made by Brown to turn back away from the path of sin and go to his Faith are foiled by the devil man. He tempts and encourages him to move up and forward, telling him “We are but a little way in the forest yet” (PP405) One will have to understand the period the short story deals with, to comprehend the symbolic characters that get paraded during Brown’s journey in the forest with the devil man. The action of the story takes place in the second half of the seventeenth century. The puritan settlers of Salem were controlled by a theocracy in which the supreme law was the Christian moral law. The story of “Young Goodman Brown” takes place at a time when the infamous witch trials took place. These trials took place in 1692. Theocracy presided over these trials. Twenty odd women and men were found guilty of witch craft. They were executed. When the devil man starts referring to a list of seemingly righteous persons whom he controls by his devilish powers, the reference is symbolically made to the witch trials. The devil’s list includes Brown’s personal acquaintances and public figures. On the way to the devil’s Sabbath, in the forest Brown sees some of these upright citizen who are in the list of the devil, and even the members of clergy --- not even priests are not free from the devilish influences--passing by. He gets so scared that he hides behind trees and watches them pass by. He finds out that, the light of heaven is not falling on them as they have chosen the path of darkness. The devil man also tells Brown that even his family ancestors like his father and grandfather were under his spell. The brutal acts they committed in the name of God were actually done with devilish influences he adds. Here the reference is clearly to the witch trails. “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 pinch pine knot, kindled at my own hearth to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philips’s war.” (Ibid PP 405) It is after this that the pair meets Goody Cloyse, who is an upstanding woman. (Note her name too: she is “Goody”, who had fallen into the trap of the devil.) Devil advises him to go after that woman. But Brown makes another try to get out of the path of sin and get back to his “Faith”. The dialogue again becomes symbolic here: “Is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?” he asks the devil. Instead of showing him the way, the devil disappears here. In his final attempt to escape, Brown looks up to the sky to pray. But a black cloud obscures his look up to the heavens. From the black cloud he hears the voices of many sinners. In this crowd of voices he hears his wife’s voice too. He tries to save her from this world of darkness and sin by crying out to her: “Faith! Faith! Look up to heaven, and resist the Wicked One!” But he reaches the point of his final failure, when something falls slowly down from the sky through the air and gets caught on the branch of a tree. The young man takes it and it is a pink ribbon. The pink ribbon symbolizes his wife Faith, as earlier in the story the author tells us about “the wind playing with the pink ribbons in her cap.” More over the pink ribbons represent and symbolize the innocence and purity of the heart of Faith. The devil takes away that innocence and purity. “My Faith is gone.” Brown cries out loud. He tries to escape out of the darkness by running around wildly in the woods. But it is difficult to get out of the path of sin once you get into it. The next day morning Brown returns to Salem. Life goes on there as usual, making him wonder whether his journey through the dark forest was a dream or not. (Refer back to the earlier quote of Robert Ewens on primordial symbols and dreams).The author leaves it unclear whether it was dream or not. Anyway, Brown could never be the same man again after that journey to the woods of devils and sins. He becomes “a stern, a sad, a darkly, meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man.” He dies years later. But “his dying hour was gloom”, concludes Nathaniel Hawthorne. The image of the journey or travel, the Odyssey, is a symbolic epic concept in classic literature. Homer used it in Odyssey. Valmeeki used it the Indian epic Ramayana. One of the epic films of last century the Battle Ship Potemkin by Sergio Eisenstein used the same epic narrative device. Life is a journey and all of us are travelers. During this journey each one of us are forced to make our own choices. Our journey of life is often through woods. And we are at cross roads too, forcing us to choose one of the roads. During this journey of life we are tested by the spell of the devil constantly. Only faith in God can save us from these temptations. ================================== Works Cited: 1) . Ewens B Robert: An Introduction to Theories of Personalities, , Lawrence Erlbaum,6th edition, February 1,2003 2) Hawthorne Nathaniel, The young Goodman Brown, Literature: An introduction to reading and Writing. 7th Edition, Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. Upper Saddle River , NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004 Read More