The Forest of Goodman Brown PDF

The Forest of Goodman Brown's Night: A Reading of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman
Brown"
Author(s): Reginald Cook
Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Sep., 1970), pp. 473-481
Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/363309
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MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS
THE FOREST OF GOODMAN BROWN'S NIGHT:

A READING OF HAWTHORNE'S
"YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN"
REGINALD COOK
"Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about

Hamlet v. 2, 220
IN a literary epoch when the dominant field of action was the

frontier settlement, the forest, and the fort, Hawthorne fo-
cussed on the world of moral imagination. His "Young Goodman
Brown" (1835) is a paradigm of this particular world, and Brown's
behavior on a fateful night in his life is the key to this haunting
tale. Although the motives for Goodman Brown's behavior are
ambiguous, the consequences of his compulsive acts are clear but
frightening.
It is truly an enchanted forest into which Goodman Brown en-
ters on his way to keep a tryst. "The magic forest," says Heinrich
Zimmer in The King and the Corpse, "is always full of adventures.
No one can enter it without losing his way. The forest has always
been a place of initiation for there the demonic presences, the an-
cestral spirits, and the forces of nature reveal themselves." Brown
is no exception. For in the forest he is made aware of demonic
presences, ancestral spirits, and he confronts the forces of nature
in their strange and fearful aspects. "The forest is the antithesis of
house and heart, village and field boundary, where the household
gods hold sway and where human laws and customs prevail," con-
tinues the explanatory Zimmer. "It holds the dark forbidden
things-secrets, terrors, which threaten the protected life of the
ordered world of common day." With one exception this is true of
Brown's experience. The seat of darkness upon which the castle of
Merlin stands in the forest of ancient myth is transformed in Haw-
thorne's tale into a Witches' Sabbath where the enchantments of
primitive mythology are secularized in the dour Calvinistic scheme
of universal human guilt.
"But the chosen one, the elect, who survives its [the enchanted
473
474 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
forest's] deadly peril is," as Zimmer says, "reborn and leaves

changed man." Ironically, Brown's initiation and rebirth re
sent an inversion of the customary ritual. His survival is phy
forevermore he is spiritually spellbound, the effect of which is
bewilderment and distrustfulness. Sinking into a torpor of
demptive guilt-consciousness, when he dies no hopeful vers
carved upon his tombstone, "for his dying hour was gloom."
The reader does not fail to see that as Brown goes from th
lage to the forest he passes from a conscious world to a sub
scious one. Upon returning from the extraordinary forest c
to the commonplace village orthodoxy, Brown's traumatic s
leaves him a deeply suspicious man. To a reader indoctrinat
Freudian and Jungian psychology the tale gathers meaning f
the modern explorations of the subconscious mind, enkindle
aesthetic sensibility by its reliance on imagination, and appe
the antirational, which interests us in the surrealistic art of Salv
dor Dali, Marcel Duchamp, and Joan Miro.
We are introduced to the strange world of young Good
Brown by its "solidity of specification." The locale is Salem
lage; the time shortly after King Philip's War. Since the for
fifteen minutes from the village, the action is significantly wit
the ambit of civilized society. Only the forest of the night is st
The beginning and the end of the tale are real enough but
middle is somnambulistic. At the close Hawthorne inquires:
Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dream
wild dream of a witch meeting?" Not to keep us waiting, H
thorne begins the next paragraph balefully. "Be it so if you
but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Br
If the author's "be it so if you will" is so much dust in the ey
keep us off the target, I for one don't mind. Hawthorne's m
believe is more evocative of the heart's truths than many re
spitting image of actuality.
II
When he leaves his three-months' wedded wife, Faith (an ob-

vious symbol) and her pink ribbons in Salem, Brown's nocturnal
journey, it is understood, cannot be postponed. It must be accom-
plished between sunset and sunrise. Nor is it enticing journeying.
The road is dreary and narrow; the forest is gloomy. The real can
hardly be distinguished from the illusory. Shadow density is ac-
centuated. Twilight fades into dusk, dusk into gloomy night. It is
MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS 475
scary-"as lonely as could be"; and perhaps a devilish

stands behind every wayside tree.
Then Brown is joined by a fellow traveler of the sam
similarly dressed, resembling him in expression but dist
ble. He is, indeed, the Devil. Not Cotton Mather's diabolical
"small black man," or Goethe's Mephisto, the tempter, or Henry
James's clever Peter Quint, or Gide's raissoneur, or Ivan Karama-
zov's irritating alter ego, but certainly God's old Arch-Enemy-an
urbane intrigant, who carries for a fetish a twisted staff that re-
sembles a great live black snake. The diabolic fellow traveler
knows all about the hereditary taint in Brown's forebears. "They
were my good friends," he acknowledges familiarly. He once
helped Brown's grandfather lash the Quaker women; he kindled
the pitch-pine knot with which Brown's incendiary father ruthless-
ly set fire to an Indian village in King Philip's War. He has, to
say the least, "a very general acquaintance here in New England."
Smooth, wily, taunting, facile in argument, mercurial in mood,
now gravely considerate, now irrepressible in laughter, he turns
aside Brown's attempts to defend the good works of his family.
Subtly the Devil succeeds in infecting Brown with an apprehen-
sion of evil in his family, in his friends, in his moral and spiritual
advisers, in the worthies of the community, and, not least, in his
young wife. Blighting what he touches, and denigrating whom-
ever he mentions in human society, the Devil casts a spell of pro-
found disillusionment on Brown. First he exposes the duplicity of
Goody Cloyse, moral instructress of Brown's youth, whose
shadowy figure appears on the forest path in the dusk. Stubbornly
Brown refuses to succumb to general suspicion on such slight cir-
cumstantial evidence. He will still trust in Faith. So the Devil to
break him down confronts him with the revered minister of the
village and with good old Deacon Gookin. Brown, who has
stepped aside from the thread of the narrowing forest path, can-
not be sure of the shadowy figures that pass along the way; only
their voices are recognizable. Goody Cloyse had mumbled antic-
ipatory remarks about seeing somewhere in the forest at "the
meeting" a nice young man (Brownl). The minister and the deacon
anticipate seeing a goodly young woman (Faith!) "taken into com-
munion." Even this trying episode is not enough to overwhelm
the devil-resistant Brown. He looks heavenward where the stars
are "brightening." "'With heaven above and Faith below, I will
yet stand firm against the devil!' cried Goodman Brown." And he
does for the moment.
Brown's resolution is not shaken until he hears from an ominous
dark cloud the "confused and doubtful sound of voices" of both
"pious and ungodly" people. One lamenting voice is that of

young woman-apparently Faith-"yet with an uncertain sorrow,
and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her
to obtain." This low-pitched, connotative statement is surely a
stroke of Hawthorne's art when we consider the emotional pligh
of a baffled and bereft Brown. Shouting out Faith's name, he is
mocked to the echo. Then his resolution breaks and, in his extreme
dejection, the dark cloud disappears and a pink ribbon which
flutters down compounds his anguish. There is no goodness he
thinks; "sin is but a name." He capitulates. "Come, devil; for to
thee is this world given." Abandoned, he despairs, and despairing
like Ethan Brand, he laughs hysterically loud and long. Unlike th
Devil's laughter, his is not mirthful, but terrible to hear.
Brown runs madly along the wild, dreary, obscure path that
takes him deeper into the heart of darkness. The night is now filled
with frightful sounds and, among these, as in Moussorgsky's "A
Night on Bald Mountain," there is a sound "like a distant church
bell"-the wind. Possessed by the hysteria of despair, Brown tries
to outlaugh what he thinks is the scornful derision of the wilder
ness. In the forest of the night-that is to say, in the blackness of
his subconscious despair-"he was himself the chief horror of the
scene, and shrank not from its other horrors." Devil-possessed an
despairing, he runs through the haunted forest, brandishing his
staff, venting horrid blasphemy, outracing the fiend who, by now,
has pretty well victimized the bedeviled husbandman.
Goodman Brown's frenzied charge through the forest is halted
by a lurid red light in a forest enclosure where a grave and dark
clad congregation, their several voices rolling solemnly through
the wild night, worship at a Witches' Sabbath. Before the forest-
hemmed group rears a pulpit rock, illumined by blazing pine tops
and among the assembled leaders of the Salem community are
both the reputable and pious as well as the suspect, dissolute, and
criminal. Sinners and Indian priests, heathen and Christian, are
distinguishable but united. And leading the impious assembly is
one of the grave New England divines.
When the cry for converts is raised, Brown is led forward by
Deacon Gookin to the blazing altar where he stands with

proselyte, a veiled woman, none other than Faith. Welc
the loathful brotherhood of lechers, poisoners, parricide
fanticides, the couple is exhorted to be undeceived. "Ev
nature of mankind," they are told. "Evil must be your o
piness." Before the fiend-light of the unhallowed altar, g
faces "that would be seen next day at the council board
province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, look
heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, f
holiest pulpits in the land," the husband and wife ab
baptized in "the mystery of sin" look upon each other and s
Imploring his wife to resist the devil and look to heaven
breaks the spell.
The telltale disclosure of Brown's illusory nocturnal m
is a natural fact. First he staggers against a rock which
and damp. Then a hanging twig, which a moment b
seemed on fire, "besprinkled his cheek with the coldest
tactile fact disabuses his overwrought imagination. The f
is delusive. Nevertheless the nocturnal meeting will hau
his dying day. Next morning he is observed in Sale
"staring around him like a bewildered man." He shrinks
good old minister; he challenges as a recusant the old Dea
he overhears praying; he interferes in Goody Cloyse's
exercises by snatching away a child being catechized, "as
grasp of the fiend himself," and he behaves strangely to
"almost kissed her husband before the whole village."
Young Goodman Brown is not the same man who at su
day before entered upon the errand into the wilderness
grudging compulsion. The "fearful dream" has done
Somewhere in this fact and phrase is the heart of Haw
message, it would seem.
III
How shall we riddle this marvellous tale? One of Hawthorne's

attributions is an ability to penetrate the surface of conscious per
ception. In his introduction to Psychology and Alchemy, Jung
says: "It must/be admitted that the archetypal contents of the co
lective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible form
in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled ration-
alist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting
fears." In "Young Goodman Brown" Hawthorne continues a
lonely vigil in the dark surrealistic forest of the American mind.
He reveals presciently the turbulence beneath the layers of the
Puritan conscience: the form its guilt takes, the contributions of
grace and election, the sense of justice, the invocation of mercy.
He evokes the depth of the Puritan mind which expresses itself,
not only in witches' waxen images pricked with thorns, but in the
nocturnal coven and in the black man's book in which are in-
scribed names in blood from cut fingers. Under the spell of
dark imagination which apprehends tragic realities, Hawthor
never fails to acknowledge the community of human relationsh
What Brown discovers is a terrible thing, surely; not that evil
exists with good in human nature, but that "evil is the nature
mankind." He also finds out what it means to be inducted into a
mystery that makes him "more conscious of the secret of others."
And he exults as he beholds "the whole earth one stain of guilt,
one mighty blood spot." One mighty blood spot! To the exclusion
of anything else, guilt prevails, and all things are evermore suspect.
The effect of Brown's discovery is terrible. What he should have
recognized as only one of the powerful forces in "the collective un-
conscious" becomes the exclusive force. After the night of the fear-
ful dream, Goodman Brown, of whom there are thousands re-
sembling him as his name, sex, and age imply, is unable to accept
as true of himself what is true of all men: that evil is counterbal-
anced by an essential good.
The dream journey is a remarkable one. The compulsion that
drives him is not only inward (he doesn't, for instance, share its
motive with anyone else, certainly not with Faith); it is downward.
The descent is symbolized by the journey from daylight into night,
from consciousness to subconsciousness, from reality to illusion,
from physical to psychical, from light to dark. The chief positive
factor is Brown's fidelity to the covenant, the consequences of
which suggest that fidelity is not a higher virtue than intelligent
exercise of will. The effect upon him is negative; he is equal to the
obligation of the tryst but he is not equal to its consequences. He
is forever turned darkly inward, a distrustful and despairing man.
When Brown returns from the forest, the nature of his change
is as arresting as the motive for his compulsive pact with the devil
is equivocal. He has been there, but exactly why he has had to be
there is not clear. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph
Campbell describes the mythic hero. "A hero ventures forth from
the world of common day into a region of supernatural

he says; "fabulous forces are there encountered and a de
tory is won; the hero comes back from this mysteriou
with the power to bestow honors on his fellow men." Ho
Campbell's description of the hero can be applied to Ha
protagonist. The world of common day is in the tale; s
the region of supernatural wonders and the fabulous f
there is no victory, and so Brown's return from the my
venture is without prestigious power to bestow honors.
contrary. An antihero, he rabidly infects his fellow man
virus of his grim, inexpiable despair of human trust.
IV
What meaning does this tale have for us today? What in the
story has survival value beyond the interest a reader has in the
effectivehless of Hawthorne's artistic competence? How to account
for Brown's malaise is really less relevant than the meaning of his
actions. It would appear-and this is, I think, Hawthorne's insight
-a case of psychic masochism in which Brown's compulsion is in
reality the expression of the desire for self-punishment. Brown
appears to do nothing wrong except to go through with a commit-
ment that he might reasonably have rejected in the first place. Yet
once having committed himself, he still might have exorcised the
inner devil of suspicion. That he fails to do this is his particular
story and our particular revelation. There is no forestalling self-
punishment. Neither is it possible to modify the effects inflicted on
others-on Faith and the community of Brown's fellowship. And
this is similarly applicable to every self-destructive protagonist in
literature, whether a Byronic, Melvilleian, Hardyesque, or contem-
porary fictional character.
The symbolic forest of the night is, in effect, young Goodman
Brown's own dark soul where belief turns into doubt, faith into
skepticism, and where the people encountered are the adumbra-
tions of his daily familiars and ancestral past. This dream is sym-
bolically true. Significantly, it underscores D. H. Lawrence's con-
tention. "You must look through the surface of American art and
see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning," said Lawrence.
"Otherwise it is all mere childishness." The symbolic meaning is
to be found in the stresses and conflicts, the compulsions and re-
pressions whose compensations, as Sir Herbert Read says in The
Philosophy of Modern Art, are found in "the physical horrors of
war and persecution." The Walpurgis Nacht of Dachau and Buch-
enwald of the 1940's had its source in the conflict between the
Nazis and the Jews for the extension of power in the economic
system of twentieth-century Germany.
Hawthorne's tale embodies the effect of tensions applicable in
the social life of a nation, a people, and individuals. "Young
Goodman Brown" focusses on one of these archetypal stresses. The
tale is, as we have noted, a paradigm. It focusses on a fearful dream
that is part of our subconscious reality. Although Hawthorne's
medium is fiction, he is focussing on truth as he understands it.
But he has chosen to release this truth as though it were a dream
fantasy. The gas ovens of the 1940's and the lurid Witches' Sab-
bath of the seventeenth century are equally symbolic. So symbolic,
in fact, that he who runs may read, but he who runs with most
deliberation may read the deepest meaning. Diabolism is quite as
apparent in what others do to us by persecution as it is in what we
do to ourselves when we fail in acknowledging the moral conse-
quences of our actions.
The important point in Hawthorne's tale is not that Brown's
malaise is, or seems, incurable, but that it is definitely symptomatic.
Given these traits, tendencies, and impulses and the effect will be
comparable. Anyone of us might be susceptible to a similar psy-
chological predicament. The syndrome is complete. What is signifi-
cant about the tale? The epiphany occurs when the reader released
from the narrative's pervasive darkness is struck by Hawthorne's
laser. However much Brown fails himself by stubborn will, de-
termined pride, callow gullibility, and obsessively fixated self-
centeredness, he does not, even in his frailty, fail us. As Robert
Frost says: "So false it is that what we haven't we can't give." This
is one of the great paradoxes in the human condition. Brown's
negativism challenges us to find a means of establishing positive
traits. The opposite of Brown's unendurable world of incertitude
is one where the enabling virtues of compassion and pity, love and
trust, fidelity, and hope are activated. Brown, one in the gallery of
Hawthorne's moody men which includes Brand and Bourne, War-
land and Chillingworth, is the psychological victim hung up be-
tween damnation and salvation.
In the harrowing world of incertitude in which he lives out his
days Brown is psychologically sick with the fear that what he ha
seen in the illusory forest of the night is so, that all those hallu
cinatory scenes were in reality peopled by victims of sin familiar to
him. When illusions are mistaken for realities the victim is caugh
in his own trap; is, in effect, self-betrayed. Hawthorne's climacti
statement is apposite. "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a dis-
trustful, if not desperate man, did he become from the night of
that fearful dream." In the forest of Brown's night only the wrath
of God burns brightly. His journey into an awareness of evil brings
a consciousness of guilt without redemption. Unable to transcend
the experience through humility and compassion, he is resigned t
desperation. In consequence, he symbolizes the man who is
shriveled rather than tempered by the pain and suffering which
accompany an encounter with evil. It can never be said of him as
it is said in Meister Eckhart: "Not till the soul knows all that there
is to be known can she pass over to the unknown good."
Hawthorne's insight is startling: that confronting us every-
where is the inescapable universal guilt, like one mighty blood
spot as ineradicable as the stains on Lady Macbeth's hands and
soul. The effect on Brown-and on us-is haunting. This tale re-
enacts an unfortunate fall. Brown keeps his compact, encounters
a demon, and suffers an ordeal, only to be irrevocably transformed
by the experience in no soul-cleansing way. "But clear Truth is a
thing for salamander giants only to encounter;" says Melville,
"how small the chances for the provincials then?" Small, indeed,
if the provincial is like Goodman Brown who, when tested by a
searing experience, proves equal to the occasion but unequal to its
effect, and forever after remains a victim of a corrosive soul-tortur-
ing suspicion of general human guilt.

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The Forest of Goodman Brown's Night: A Reading of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman

THE FOREST OF GOODMAN BROWN'S NIGHT:

"Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about

IN a literary epoch when the dominant field of action was the

forest's] deadly peril is," as Zimmer says, "reborn and leaves

When he leaves his three-months' wedded wife, Faith (an ob-

scary-"as lonely as could be"; and perhaps a devilish

"pious and ungodly" people. One lamenting voice is that of

Deacon Gookin to the blazing altar where he stands with

How shall we riddle this marvellous tale? One of Hawthorne's

the world of common day into a region of supernatural

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