Young Goodman Brown, Essay Example

Fantasy and Reality in “Young Goodman Brown”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, “Young Goodman Brown,” is well known for blurring the line between fantasy and reality. For many readers, the question of whether or not the events of the story are real or whether they are a dream that Goodman Brown experiences is crucial in determining the theme of the story. The difficulty is that Hawthorne appears to have left the determination ambiguous by design. By doing so, Hawthorne opens the possibility to express a theme about the way the human mind interacts with objective reality. The story is an allegory which many critics interpret as being based on the theme of innocence and experience. However, another way of interpreting the allegorical aspects of the story is that it reflects what modern psychology defines as the conscious and unconscious parts of the human mind. Hawthorne’s strategy in the story is to show that when a person tries to repress their own dark side, they succeed only in projecting their immoral or sinful tendencies on the world around them.

A key sign that Hawthorne wants to blur the lines between fantasy and reality in order to show the interaction between the rational mind and the irrational mind is that he openly asks the question in the text of the story. Hawthorne writes: “”Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (Hawthorne 73). With this question, Hawthorne prods the reader into wondering the same thing. The question continues to haunt the reader because there is no accurate answer. The implication of Hawthorne’s ambiguity is that it makes no difference in the context of the story whether Goodman Brown’s experiences in the wood were real or dreamed. The end-result is that the experiences transform Goodman Brown. They are authentic in that he has an authentic response to them.

Goodman Brown’s first glimpse of the devil gives another clue that his encounter is actually an encounter with another dimension of himself. The devil, disguised as a traveler, is actually Goodman Brown’s alter-ego, or doppelganger. In terms of modern psychology, the devil in Hawthorne’s story is a symbol for what Carl Jung called “the shadow.” This is a person’s dark side that is usually repressed.  Hawthorne describes the traveler this way: “As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveler was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him” (Hawthorne 62). The fact that Goodman Brown and the devil look alike is not an accident. Hawthorne uses this as a device to show that the devil is Goodman Brown’s repressed side, or his “shadow.”

Goodman Brown’s encounter with the devil is important whether or not the encounter is an objective reality or a dream experienced only in Goodman Brown’s mind. Hawthorne is saying that the human mind is more powerful than the physical world. This is because a person’s beliefs and convictions shape the way they perceive reality so much as to make any perception of objective reality impossible. Instead we exist in a subjective state where they perceive a part, but never the whole, of reality. Hawthorne’s theme in the story is actually a criticism of the blind prejudice that his Puritan ancestors held. The Puritan beliefs had led to the Salem witch Trials and the murder of innocent people due to the fact that the Puritans themselves were blinded by their own attitudes and prejudices. The Puritans were so obsessed with sin and evil that they repressed their own shadows and created an unconscious projection of evil onto the world around them. The blurring of the line between fantasy and reality is Hawthorne’s way of offering a stern criticism of the Puritanical heritage of America.

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Mosses from an Old Manse. Vol. 1. New York: John B. Alden, 1888.