Today we’re reading a classic of early American Gothic literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’, which you can read here. For an interesting modern take on the story which resets it in a different historical era and location, I can recommend the music video to Brandon Flowers ‘Can’t Deny My Love’ which you can watch here.
Like many early American Gothic texts, Hawthorne’s work are often set in New England as he confronts its puritan past and the shadow of the Salem witch trials. Hawthorne has a family connection to the witch trials. His ancestor John Hathorne was one of the key judges involved in the Salem Witch Trials. It’s a legacy that Hawthorne found deeply troubling. As a young man, he changed his name from ‘Hathorne’ to ‘Hawthorne’ – a small distancing step from his Puritan ancestors and their role in early Salem and the later witch trials. ‘Young Goodman Brown’ takes a look at Salem village, depicting it as a place rife with demonic dealing and hypocrisy. At first glance, it might seem that this is an avowal of the demonic nature of the inhabitants, a reflection of a witching history. However, the target of the story is more properly Puritan hypocrisy and the paranoia which tracks Goodman Brown until his death. Young Goodman Brown might have gone to meet the devil in the forest, he might have seen a witch’s sabbath but then again, perhaps not. Hawthorne asks us to consider the reality of his experience:
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?
Whether his experience in the forest is real or not (and to what extent it is real) poses a puzzle for the reader but I don’t think it would be amiss to question whether the answer really matters. Goodman Brown is beset with hypocrisy – he goes to the woods for nefarious purposes and comes back self-righteously assured of everyone else’s iniquity. He’s paranoid and ready to see evil and double-dealing in everyone but himself. There’s also a cold cruelty to his actions throughout the rest of his life – a withdrawal of human sympathy – which makes his own life and those around him miserable.
Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.
His end is unmourned but he has himself to blame, rather than the devil. I always found the end of this tale bitter and often think of Faith’s life as it must have been lived.
We’ve been talking a lot about devils the last few days (and we’ll probably meet some more over the next month!) but I’d like to finish by taking a look at this story for what it reveals about the early American Gothic. Like many works of the period, it’s set in the North East and specifically engages with New England history. In this case, Salem town and puritan history. Other works look at other aspects of history and/or wider areas: the Dutch settlers and the Revolutionary War (Washington Irving in works like ‘Sleepy Hollow’ whose ‘headless horseman’ was a hessian solider who fought for the British in the Revolutionary war and whose characters and setting reflect on the clash of values between old Dutch settler communities and the modern ‘yankee’), the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia (Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn), religious extremism (Hawthorne and Brockden Brown). The sources of fear in these texts are numerous but a common source is the ‘wilderness’, including the forests. Places on the edge of towns, a place unconquered, capable of hiding everything feared. This interest in wilderness spaces as the borderland between realities, as places of menace and danger, and as fundamentally outside of colonial control is central to today’s short story. That’s where the devil dwells, after all.
The other source of fear evident in this text and many others is the indigenous population. It’s something I noticed quite starkly in today’s re-reading, felt deeply uncomfortable about, and thought it would be wrong not to address. Goodman Brown fears indigenous people hiding in the woods, he sees them in the witch’s council (a horrific, to him, mixing of people in seeming equality), and associates indigenous peoples with dark and terrible magical practices. We could argue about whether these perceptions are uniquely tied to Goodman’s Brown’s questionable perspective or whether they are validated in some sense by the narratorial voice. My own feeling is that they’re so passing and yet so persistent that they’re a broader reflection of simple reuse of a trope. Hawthorne includes a condemnation of extensive violence in the story, suggesting that the devil was involved with Goodman Brown’s father setting ‘fire to an Indian village, in king Phillip’s war’. However, it is arguably the scale of the violence here, against an entire village, that is the focus of critique here rather than, necessarily, the target of that violence. It is certainly Goodman Brown’s comment (rather than the narrator’s) which fears that ‘there may be a devilish Indian behind every tree’. However, the narrator’s reference to the sounds of the wood – ‘the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beats, the yells of Indians’ – is a typical example of the basic strategies of portrayal in the story. The ‘yells’ are compared to the sounds of animals and trees. Bestial, they are associated with justifiable fear. They are heard together, unintelligible and inhuman, compared to the noises of conversation that Brown hears from the settlers. They are, in other words, another monster in the forest for Hawthorne’s narrator as well as his main character.
It’s worth remembering in reading texts like ‘Young Goodman Brown’ that the story offers us much to interpret and dissect, to discuss and to enjoy in its complex interrogation of puritan hypocrisy and paranoia, but depictions such as these are not simply a matter of literary record. They aren’t something that we should pass by nor simply accept as ‘of the time’ without considering their context (‘we’ refers throughout this section to readers, like myself, who do not belong to Indigenous populations). The context being that just such depictions of indigenous peoples (as radically other, savage and threatening) in both fiction and contemporary political, military and social rhetoric, were the depictions used to justify, excuse or explain acts of violence, land grabs, and removals. The depiction of the native populations as brutal antagonists or devilish strangers in the forest is common in the early Gothic, a trope, one that Hawthorne draws on briefly and in passing. It is a recurring motif in the Gothic, a fear explored, but also a justification for violence. People love to make monsters of the very people they are victimising. In finishing on this note, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t read this story or enjoy many parts of it. Nor am I suggesting that we should ignore it or any of the fascinating aspects of it that I’ve explored above. I am saying that it has elements that take their place in a wider tapestry of irremediable harm and if we ignore that, we risk turning away from the truth for an easy lie or an unconscionable indifference. Especially considering the continuing fight for rights, as especially land rights, for Indigenous populations in the USA. As aficionados of Gothic and horror, we can’t praise the power of horror and the Gothic only when it suits us. We can’t wax lyrical about its ability to reflect contemporary society, its fears and anxieties, without considering the implications of that. Horror has power because, after all, if you’ve made someone your monster, what can’t you justify doing to them?
I should also say that I’m not really the person to be speaking about this! Listen to Indigenous commentators. I only wanted to comment on something pertinent to today’s story from my own perspective (as I’m trying to do every day). Thoughts welcome!
Romancing the Gothic 