Week 4 Discussion Guide: Tuesday
First, we will try to arrive at some agreement about the characters and plot of "Young Goodman Brown," but it will not be easy and there is good evidence that Hawthorne intended that effect. Read the paragraph below for some clues to his composition strategies (and don't try them in your academic writing!). Then, we will continue to use the textual analysis worksheet to compare"YGB"'s components to those of "MKMM." You probably noticed that Robin's experiences in "MKMM" often are reported to us by the narrator in ways which call into question Robin's abilities to see, or to understand what he sees. Sources of Robin's unreliability as a source are easy to find once we reread analytically: his fatigue and lack of food, the night lit by blinding artificial light and deceptive moonlight, and most importantly, the townsfolk, all of whom are actively deceiving him. Hawthorne seems to have built these sources of doubt into the story with great care, keeping his narrator from becoming too "omniscient" by refusing to allow him to tell us for certain what is going on outside the field of Robin's vision and hearing. It's as if we were trapped in Robin's skull, or at least, only able to see a limited portion of the town without using Robin's eyes and ears. This turns out to be a fairly common feature of Hawthorne's narrative style in the short stories, though I confess to having loaded the evidence pool by the selection of these three.
The protagonist of "Young Goodman Brown" is constructed with an even tighter grip on our access to reliable information, but the sources of his instability are more subtle. They especially appeal to belief patterns shared by readers who love stories in which ghosts and demons and other supernatural creatures play a role. As an ordinary American reader, I share that love, but as a scholar, I also know it is a love authors have been known to use for their own purposes. Keep in mind, for instance, that this tale is set in historical New England, specifically in Salem, Massachusetts, where although some townsfolk became convinced that their neighbors were witches and had them killed, few people today believe that the "Devil" had anything to do with it, rather than superstition and mob psychology. Nevertheless, Hawthorne's readers almost always are taken in by the tale's subtle insinuations about Brown's reported experiences in the woods that night. Look for forms of the verb "to be" that have been altered to weaken their certainty into forms like "seemed" or "might have been" or "could easily have been mistaken for." That may help you escape the tale's powerful "dream," but you will have to fight hard. Why might Hawthorne want to induce his readers to imagine they are reading a report of a "witches' Sabbath" in Salem? What aesthetic, psychological, or moral effects might he be attempting to achieve? Do you know of any reasons why Hawthorne might be strongly interested in these Colonial-era events?
If we have time, we also will look at these web pages about ways to detect patterns of evidence that are called "stylistic," and about the "best reader" concept as it applies to a literary analysis paper.
Click here for a short discussion of "allegory" vs. fictional realism in character construction.