The Religious Aspects of Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne - Book Report/Review Example

Religious aspects in Young Goodman Brown number Religious aspects in Young Goodman Brown One of the most enchanting short stories of American literature and certainly one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s finest, Young Goodman Brown critiques Puritan ideology that seeks to repress the desires of man and introduce doubt into every aspect of his mind. In this short story, Hawthorne attempts to create through the character of Goodman Brown, a man who has led the puritan life but goes astray in what seems to be a dream of his and lives his repressed desires through this dream. This dream, however, shatters his sense of reality and he begins to see evil even where it does not exist. The story of Brown alerts one to the dangers that are inherent in the puritan life that stifles the creativity of man and the only recourse that his imagination has is to resurface in his dreams where they display an unhealthy tendency to distort the boundaries between reality and illusion. Much of the analysis of this short story has followed the contributions of psychoanalysis to our understanding of the nature of dreams and the repressed. They have helped in the understanding of the story as one that critiques the excessive control of religion over the life of an individual. Hawthorne’s critique is leveled against the religious fervor that the puritan establishments of New England, where the story is set, has displayed, since the migration of people from England to America in search of a new colony to create a land that would be a model to the rest of the planet in their adherence to Christian ideals. Hawthorne deals not only with Christian ideas but also with the prejudices that Christian settlers had regarding Native American religion and rituals. Relegated to the margins of the white settlements, these original inhabitants of America are labeled as the friends of the devil. Hawthorne’s story of Goodman Brown manages to have some sympathy for the condition of the Native Americans but is guilty on many an occasion of referring to the devil and the powwow in the same breath. But then, the entire story revolves around a recognition of the fact that everybody is a sinner, at least in the mind. Hawthorne sets his story in the forest near the village of Salem. The forest, according to Reginald Cook, is set in opposition to the house which represents the outward appearance of the man and his spotless reputation. The forest on the other hand, abounds in “demonic presences” and “ancestral spirits” that represent elements of pagan religions that are set in opposition to the Christian atmosphere of the house and the village (Cook). It is implicit that civilization is necessarily Christian and the absence of Christianity means an absence of a civilized ethos. This amounts to a rejection of extremely complex religious beliefs that other cultures, including Native American civilizations, had. This was a very important aspect of the puritan establishment which used religion as a cover for the imperial designs of Britain. By belittling the beliefs of a certain civilization and setting oneself as the person who needs to introduce civilization in a particular place, one fails to incorporate in one’s way of living, which is what religion essentially is, the beliefs of anther community that may serve to enhance the quality of one’s life. Brown, as well as critics of Young Goodman Brown is often guilty of mistaking appearance with reality, says David Levin in his essay, Shadows of Doubt: Specters of Evidence in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (Levin). The appearance of the devil may be connected to the real devil, since there are enough indications to that effect. However, other characters can merely be a figment of the imagination of the character in the story. In any case, there is a great deal of ambiguity regarding the fact as to whether the events in the story are real or an illusion. The illusionary nature of the events may be interpreted as a dream or as an imagined reality, which is still illusionary. This can also be connected to Richard Predmore’s idea of the “night journey” that Brown undertakes as a journey into the unconscious. Using the theories of Carl Jung, he seeks to analyse the nature of the night journey and the characters that people the dream journey of Goodman Brown as the journey of the protagonist, Goodman Brown, into the unconscious regions of his mind (Predmore). This renders the religious nature of the story extremely problematic and the illusionary nature of the story actually brings in the question of sinning within one’s own mind, rather than performing any physical action that may be interpreted as sin, because one is able to see it directly. It is not only the appearance of sin that must be viewed as sin but also what is generally construed as the illusion of it, is what Hawthorne seems to be suggesting in this story of his. These illusions play themselves out in the mind of the people who repress their desires to sin. This inevitability of sin is not necessarily a problem in the lives of men, according to Hawthorne and arises primarily due to what Harold Bloom calls the “societal overconditioning” (Bloom 2, 2005) of men during the era of Puritanism, when the repression that was carried out in the name of religion was very high. It was during the beginning of the puritan era that the burning of a large number of witches took place in Salem. It is thus, also significant that the story of Goodman Brown is set in the town of Salem, to which the author of the story, Nathaniel Hawthorne also belongs. Hawthorne expresses his deep relation to the town of Salem in what is arguable his most famous book, The Scarlet Letter. In the “Custom House” section of this novel, he talks about how one of his ancestors was involved in the burning of witches during the initial migration of the English to America (Hawthorne). He expands on this relation as one that made him a part of the town of Salem, without him having willed it so. Because of these elements, one is able to place Goodman Brown in a historical context and not see him as merely an everyman character who represents the whole of humanity in an ahistorical manner. Bloom goes on to compare Young Goodman Brown to The Scarlet Letter and talks of how Hawthorne prefers the subversive intent of Hester Prynne, who is the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter as opposed to the meekness of Goodman Brown. Hawthorne thus raises the question of meekness that arises often in Christian theology. Hawthorne does not favor the employment of a meek attitude while dealing with the power of the world. He endorses the meek attitude that one needs to adopt towards God in a Christian framework. The meekness towards the clergy that the puritans of the nineteenth century expected was completely opposed by Hawthorne, who felt that this attitude would be against the original puritan spirit, which was one of rebelliousness, which was renounced once the ideology of Puritanism became subsumed within the ideology of the men in power. A character like Hester Prynne is able to challenge this worldly hierarchy in a society that dubs her an outcast even though she is an extremely religious character. The clergy in The Scarlet Letter as well as in Young Goodman Brown is depicted to be one that is hypocritical and two-faced like the god Janus. Goodman Brown reposes more faith in his wife than in the clergy, thereby revealing the condition of the community that was considered to have the powers that were granted not even to the angels of heaven, that of officiating in the name of God to grant pardon. It is this same clergy that fails to do its job in leading the members of the Christian flock towards salvation. The story of Goodman Brown also critiques Calvinist Ideology that places the man in a hopeless situation whereby he has to accept his faith, whether it is election or damnation, in a system where it is the arbitrary will of God that one cannot know or change that decides one’s fate. In such an ideological framework, Brown’s crisis of faith, as Jane Donahue Eberwein says, represents the fate of “a man who thinks he has achieved saving grace but finds he has not, who discovers that the Faith he married three months ago cannot justify him and that the new life that he began with her has awakened him to sin rather than salvation” (Eberwein 20, 2005). This dilemma forces Goodman Brown to seek the mystery of the unknown, where he is able to finally find stability, not in God, but in the devil. Here, Hawthorne is not criticizing Christianity but the structures of the church that had become morally corrupt and which he thinks had become inept to handle the needs of the believers. The fissures in the ideologies of the puritan framework of life that was largely based on the ideas of John Calvin are exposed in the stories that Hawthorne seeks to tell in his short stories and novels. Like Hester Prynne, Hawthorne subverts the puritan enterprise and exposes the basic flaws that it contains through his works of fiction. There have been a wide range of interpretations that the story of Young Goodman Brown has elicited, thanks to the complexity of the tale. Critics like Leo B. Levy point out the aspect if the tale that makes it similar to a parable. They look at the aspect of allegory that is present in the tale ascribe a great part of the complexity of the tale to this aspect (Levy). This serves to place this tale of Hawthorne in a long tradition of Christian allegory that has sought to extol the virtues of a religious existence. While Hawthorne seeks t echo this sentiment in his story, he also seeks to critique the establishment of religion in this story of his. He seeks to exhort his readers to move beyond the structures of religion and embrace the spirituality that would lead them to a truly Christian life and ultimately, salvation. The character of Brown’s wife is an obvious reference to the faith in God that Brown ultimately loses, seeing evil even in those areas that are not occupied by it. While at the beginning of the story, he tells his wife or his own faith in god, “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee”, by the end of the story, his faith is an “aged woman”(Hawthorne), who follows his corpse but is not a part of his soul. In a work like Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan intends the symbols that he employs to have no subversive effect n the church but on the life of the sinner (Bunyan). While Hawthorne’s enterprise might appear to be a similar one, it is radically different and is not as simple as the one that Bunyan sets out to achieve. Following the transcendentalist philosophy of Emerson, Hawthorne is unwilling to give merely a realist account of the society that he lives in but seeks to transcend it in order to present his readers with what he thinks may be a progressive view of the society. The story, while it may seem like a depressing tale of a man who has lost his faith in religion, seeks to provide a nightmarish view of what may result if the puritan form of Christianity were allowed to flourish. Hawthorne’s faith in Christianity per se is never in doubt and can be deduced from the line where his protagonist, Goodman Brown cries out to his wife, "look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one." (Hawthorne) These words from the protagonist, who a while ago had been walking towards the altar of the devil, reinforce the faith that the reader has in the ability of the character to hold on to his faith. Since the faith that he refers to is also allegorical, it may also refer to a last attempt on his part to salvage the last remains of a faith broken by the religious structures of his time. The faith that Goodman Brown has, is always reposed in characters who are parts of the puritan structure, rather than in God. He places faith in the “pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth” (Hawthorne), the minister and Deacon Gookin. All these persons fail him, an allegory for the failure of Puritanism to lead the Christian man to the salvation that he seeks. It also reflects the failure of men like Goodman Brown, who place their faith in the hands of the wrong people and are scarred for life, without realizing the dangers of a position from where they are unable to trust God. They ironically find refuge in the hands of the tempter, who then seeks to lead them astray. The devil, in this story, is not as evil a character as his followers as he too seems to feel a certain kind of pity for the people that he leads astray. The tale of Goodman Brown was not intended to be one that leads people away from the basic tenets of Christianity. Like other works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown too, talks of the pitfalls of adopting a repressive approach to life that is imposed through religion. Through this story, Hawthorne reminds us of the need for spirituality and for the need to rescue religion from a mindless set of rituals that dominated his times. Works Cited Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown. Web. Accessed on 27th September, 2011. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1999. Print. Bunyan, John. Pilgrim’s Progress. Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1999. Print. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction”. Young Goodman Brown: Interpretations. Ed. Bloom, Harold. USA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Print. P 2 Levy, Leo B. “The Problem of Faith in “Young Goodman Brown””. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Web. Accessed on 27th September, 2011. Eberwein, Jane Donahue. “My Faith is Gone! “Young Goodman Brown” and Puritan Conversion”. Young Goodman Brown: Interpretations. Ed. Bloom, Harold. USA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Print. P 19 Predmore, Richard. “‘Young Goodman Brown’: Night journey into the forest”. Journal of Analytical Psychology. Web. < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1977.00250.x/abstract > Created July, 1977. Accessed on 27th September, 2011. Levin, David. “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown””. American Literature. Web. < http://www.jstor.org/pss/2923728 > Accessed on 28th September, 2011. Cook, Reginald. “The Forest of Goodman Brown’s Night: A Reading of Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown””. The New England Quarterly. Web. Accessed on 29th September, 2011. Read More