Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales Read online

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN

  AND OTHER TALES

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of the William Hathorne who had emigrated to New England with the first generation of Puritan settlers in 1630. Hawthorne’s interest in the history and legend of his region was revealed in his early stories, which began to appear in print in the 1830s. New England Puritanism and its legacy provided Hawthorne with the means of exploring many of the themes that concerned him deeply, among them the conflict between patriarchal authority and the impulse to a variety of freedoms, including the freedom of the artist. Though he immersed himself in the early literature of New England, Hawthorne’s own writings are peculiarly modern in some of their leading characteristics. One is the self-reflexiveness of narratives which make the telling a part of the tale. Another is the concern with signifying practices, with the relationships between objects (a Red Cross, a Black Veil, a Scarlet Letter) and what they come to signify.

  Never willing to submit to the conventions of the realist novel, when he abandoned the short story and the sketch for longer works, Hawthorne claimed the imaginative freedom of the romance. His first—The Scarlet Letter—was published in 1850 and brought him immediate critical recognition, if not financial success. In quick succession he completed two more romances—The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852)—and consolidated his position as a major writer of his day. After his appointment as consul at Liverpool and Manchester in 1853 Hawthorne produced no more fiction until i860, when The Marble Faun was published. Returning to Massachusetts in that year after travels in France and Italy, he struggled to finish other romances but left them uncompleted at his death in 1864.

  BRIAN HARDING is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Birmingham. He is the author of American Literature in Context II, 1830–1865 (1982).

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

  The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  Young Goodman Brown

  and Other Tales

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  BRIAN HARDING

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

  It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

  and education by publishing worldwide in

  Oxford New York

  Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta

  Cape Town Chennai Dar cs Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul

  Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai

  Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw

  with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

  Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

  in the UK and in certain other countries

  Published in the United States

  by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

  Introduction, Note on the Texts, Select Bibliography,

  and Explanatory Notes © Brian Harding 1987

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  This selection first published 1987 as a World’s Classics paperback

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

  and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804–1864.

  Young Goodman Brown and other tales.

  (Oxford world’s classics)

  Bibliography: p.

  I. Harding, Brian. II. Title.

  PS1852.H37 1987 813’.3 98–11119

  ISBN 978–0–19–955515–4

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–160568–0

  II

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  A Chronology of Nathaniel Hawthorne

  THE GENTLE BOY (1832)

  MY KINSMAN, MAJOR MOLINEUX (1832)

  ROGER MALVIN’S BURIAL (1832)

  THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS (1833)

  THE SEVEN VAGABONDS (1833)

  THE GREY CHAMPION (1835)

  YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN (1835)

  WAKEFIELD (1835)

  THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT (1836)

  THE MINISTER’S BLACK VEIL (1836)

  DR HEIDEGGER’S EXPERIMENT (1837)

  ENDICOTT AND THE RED CROSS (1838)

  THE BIRTHMARK (1843)

  THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD (1843)

  THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET (1844)

  EARTH’S HOLOCAUST (1844)

  THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL (1844)

  DROWNE’S WOODEN IMAGE (1844)

  RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER (1844)

  ETHAN BRAND (1850)

  Explanatory Notes

  Select Bibiography

  Textual Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  IN November 1835, over the ascription ‘Ashley A. Royce’, the New-England Magazine carried a story about a tormented young writer who burned all his manuscripts in a fit of revulsion against his own literary productions. As the title—‘The Devil in Manuscript’—suggests, the writer has convinced himself that the fiend has become involved—or is present—in his works. In a declamatory and extravagant style worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe protagonist confessing his guiltladen madness, Hawthorne’s writer, who has ‘taken the name of Oberon’, cries: ‘Oh! I have a horror of what was created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts.’1 His self-loathing is such that he resolves, ‘Not a scorched syllable shall escape!’ He therefore sets fire to the manuscripts, only to discover that when ‘the fiend has gone forth by night’ (via the blazing chimney) the whole town has caught fire. In the words of the narrator—who describes himself as Oberon’s friend, yet is given to deflationary irony in his account of the artist’s suffering—‘His frenzy took the hue of joy, and with a wild gesture of exultation, he l
eaped almost to the ceiling of the chamber.’ Oberon’s joy, it seems, was caused by the literal application of a commonplace metaphor. The tale depends for its point on the working of a fairly obvious figure of speech as Oberon exclaims: ‘Huzza! Huzza! My brain has set the town on fire!’

  Ashley A. Royce was a pen-name adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oberon was a nickname he had used in letters to his friend Horatio Bridge after they had left Bowdoin College in 1825. This tale, though its tone flickers from the melodramatic to the bathetic, has an obvious autobiographical reference, for Hawthorne repeatedly told the story of his own burned manuscripts. He told it in a personal letter to two literary friends in December 1841, when he said that he had burned ‘whole quires of manuscript stories, in past times’.2 Later, he told it publicly and made it part of his own legend, in the Preface to the 1851 edition of Twice-told Tales, when he made claims—with wry, self-deprecatory humour—for the superiority of the immolated tales over his other works in terms of brilliance. Fact and fiction are hard to disentangle here, not just in the matter of the destruction of the manuscripts, but also in the more significant matter of the diabolic possession. In ‘The Devil in Manuscript’ Oberon explains that he believes, or—oddly—‘would believe, if I chose’, that ‘there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers’. The devil is present, according to Oberon, in ‘that conception, in which I endeavoured to embody the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions and the written records of witchcraft’. For the writer, then, to put the fiend in his works by imagining him may be to give that devil some sort of reality and power. Oberon sees an analogy between the way in which the devil of tradition sucked away the happiness of those who subjected themselves to his power and the way in which his own ambitions as a writer have destroyed his pleasure in life. In his words:

  I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude—a solitude in the midst of men.3

  Thus the writer’s subjection to the devil takes the form of his entrapment in the world of his own imagination and his exclusion from the ‘real’ world.

  When Hawthorne wrote to Longfellow to explain the obscurity of his life in the years between leaving college and the publication of his first collection of tales in 1837, he used the metaphor that he had used in ‘The Devil in Manuscript’, and he used it without any ironic detachment: ‘By some witchcraft or other—for I really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore—I have been carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to get back again.’4 He went on to say that he had not lived ‘but only dreamed about living’. Witchcraft, dreaming, the enchantment that separates from life, diabolic possession and potentially dangerous (inflammatory) writing: this concatenation of ideas is at the heart of Hawthorne’s thought about the meaning of fiction and its creation.5

  Witchcraft was, literally, a theme of Hawthorne’s first projected collection of stories, which was to have had the title ‘Seven Tales of My Native Land’, according to the recollection of his sister Elizabeth,6 who believed that the tales were complete as early as 1825. Certainly, the only tale definitely intended for the volume that survived the conflagration in its original form—‘The Hollow of the Three Hills’—bears out Elizabeth’s statement, while ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’, a revised version of the ‘Alice Doane’ intended for ‘Seven Tales’,7 not only includes a Gothic story of wizardry and its evil effects but also evokes the Salem witch trials in its frame narrative, which takes the listeners and the reader to Gallows Hill. Hawthorne’s personal sense of his family’s guilt in the matter of the witch trials would be given a very public, even histrionic, expression in the ‘Custom-House’ sketch that prefaced The Scarlet Letter in 1850. There the speaker takes on himself the inherited shame from that ancestor John Hathorne who had held pre-trial hearings at Salem Village and had committed several of the accused for trial. A more covert acknowledgement of his family’s involvement was made some fifteen years earlier in ‘Young Goodman Brown’, another tale that dealt with the infamous episode in New England history.

  There is no uncertainty of tone in ‘Young Goodman Brown’. Whereas in ‘The Devil in Manuscript’ the diabolism was qualified by a bantering tone,8 ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is sombre throughout. Yet there is in this tale an uncertainty of a more disturbing kind for the reader; uncertainty about the status of the events described in the narrative. The story begins definitely enough, with a simplicity and clarity of style that might well have appealed to the young Ernest Hemingway when he was seeking the ‘simple declarative sentence’. The verbs are unequivocal; they tell us what happened in the (here trivial) action. Young Brown ‘came forth’ into the village street and ‘put his head back … to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife’. The wife ‘thrust her own pretty head into the street’ and called her husband. Nothing could be plainer, or more banal, than this domestic incident in the Puritan Salem Village. But the light of common day soon gives way to obscurity and the unknown. Faith has obviously experienced the sort of disquieting dream to which—she says—a lone woman is vulnerable. Her husband, for all his trite confidence (’Say thy prayers … go to bed at dusk … and no harm will come to thee’), is clearly no stranger to the realm of dreams, for he suspects that Faith’s anxiety springs from a premonitory dream in which his own evil purpose has been revealed to her.

  In the domain of the dark forest at least the initial verbs of action seem unambiguous. Brown ‘beheld’ a decently dressed man who ‘arose’ and ‘walked’ at the young man’s side. But the noun ‘figure’ in the phrase ‘figure of a man’, though apparently harmless and neutral, will prove to be one of the words in which the problem of perception is focused, for ‘figure’9 will turn out to be a synonym of ‘shape’ and—by implication—both will be distinguished from ‘substance’. The problematic status of Brown’s perceptions will be indistinguishable to the reader from the problem of the status of the events narrated, for both relate to the role of the narrator. As Brown and his companion journey into the heart of darkness, the verbs of perception are qualified. The second traveller was about fifty years old, ‘as nearly as could be discerned’: discerned by Brown, we assume, but when we are told that they ‘might have been taken for father and son’, we might well ask ‘by whom?’ since there were, of course, no witnesses, unless the narrator was lurking in the bushes, uncertain of what he saw, or imagining the uncertainty of any possible witnesses. The old gentleman’s staff ‘might almost be seen’ (by Brown, presumably) to twist and wriggle like a living serpent, but this ‘must have been an ocular deception’. Is this Brown’s scepticism, or the narrator’s? Is the narrator distancing himself from Brown’s credulousness, or expressing Brown’s doubts? The question of the narrator’s distance takes on greater urgency when we are told that Brown ‘recognized’ Goody Cloyse, far in the wilderness at nightfall. The historical Goody Cloyse was accused of witchcraft in 1692 on evidence no different in kind from Brown’s vision of her. Her dialogue with the devil, implicating ‘that unhanged witch, Goody Cory’, must have taken place before 22 September 1692, for the historical Martha Cory was hanged as a witch on that day. The conversation is recorded by a narrator whose word we must surely trust, unless it should prove that he is merely reporting what Brown thought he overheard. The narrator does not commit himself on the other voices Brown hears. One voice is ‘like the deacon’s’, while the reply comes in the ‘solemn old tones of the minister’. However, our narrator seems to throw the weight of his authority behind Brown when he says—of the figures gathered for the witches’ sabbath—‘in truth’ they were, as Goodman Brown said, ‘a grave and darkclad company’. Though he is merely reporting rumour about the governor’s lady (’some affirm’ that she was there, but how could they, unless ‘some’ were present?), he concedes that ‘at least there were high dames well known to her’. More shocking, even, is the narrator’s u
nqualified statement that the veiled female was led forward to be initiated into diabolic rites by Goody Cloyse and Martha Carrier, who had ‘the Devil’s promise to be queen of hell’. The unfortunate Martha Carrier was hanged for a witch in 1692. The devil’s promise to her is recorded by Cotton Mather in his Wonders of the Invisible World, a thoroughly credulous account of the witchcraft episode written by a ruthless persecutor of ‘witches’, and our narrator speaks in his words.

  Having also spoken in Mather’s words when he refers to Martha Carrier as a ‘rampant hag’, the narrator seems to throw off earlier doubts and to record the events of the witches’ sabbath as facts. What the dark figure ‘said’ is reported verbatim, and the responses of his audience of sinners are noted unequivocally: they ‘turned, and when commanded to look at each other, they did so’. When welcomed to the communion of evil, they—‘the fiend worshippers’—actually repeated the devil’s word ‘welcome … in one cry of despair and triumph’. Yet this definiteness, too, is undermined by the narrator’s reference to the ‘dark figure’ and ‘sable form’ who speaks, and his statement that the worshippers were seen ‘flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame’. Small wonder, then, that one careful reader of the tale has come to the conclusion that the narrator does not seem to fully understand what he sees.10

  A final return to the simple declarative statement is more convincing, for there is no doubt at all in anyone’s mind that when Brown ‘came slowly into the street of Salem village’ he was a changed man. He undoubtedly ‘shrank’ from the minister, who passed for a ‘venerable saint’ and plainly did snatch a child from the grasp of Goody Cloyse. Even more definitely, he ‘passed on without a greeting’, having ‘looked sternly and sadly’ into his wife’s face when she came, bursting with joy at the sight of him. But this clarity is followed by a notable example of what Ivor Winters called Hawthorne’s formula of alternative possibilities.11 Addressing the reader, the narrator asks: ‘Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?’ The reply—‘Be it so, if you will’—throws responsibility for deciding the status of the events on to the reader, yet, in the words of one of the most astute commentators on the tale, Hawthorne seems to have ‘purposely led his readers astray or … at least allowed them to go astray’.12 Sheldon Liebman’s analysis of the ‘dissimulated point of view’ in this story (and, by extension, in many of the short stories) offers us a means of understanding Hawthorne’s technique. The point of view (he argues) shifts imperceptibly from narrator to character, so that the reader sees through the eyes of the character, even when he thinks he is seeing through the narrator’s. Consequently, the story forces the reader to undergo the very temptations (of believing the ‘evidence’ so dubiously presented) that Brown himself has to endure. The focus of the art of the story thus becomes the reader’s response, for if the reader does decide that Brown really saw the people of Salem Village at the ceremony in the forest, then the reader has listened to the devil’s voice, and has been welcomed to the communion of lost souls. Putting it another way, Taylor Stoehr has suggested that ‘Young Goodman Brown’, with its obvious concern about the nature of belief in imagined realities and the status of such realities, is about itself. That is to say, since the reader has constantly to bear in mind that it is only a fiction he is engrossed in, he may not lose sight of the fact that the mode of the story is ‘supposing’, not ‘believing’.13 Not only in this tale, but generally in his fictions, according to this account of Hawthorne’s theory of mimesis, the reader is required to distinguish between the products of the imagination and natural or ‘real’ truths. Fictions, in Hawthorne’s works, are then the equivalents of dreams and visions.