Formalist Strategy and Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Introduction

It is commonly said that formalist strategies are very useful for analysing short stories, drama and novel. “Young Goodman Brown” is the classic American short story of the guilty conscience. The question Brown confronts is whether his heritage of Original Sin incapacitates him for resisting personal sin. In this profoundly ambiguous story, Brown wavers between the desperate cynicism of the corrupt soul and the hopefulness of the believer (Cook, 455-475). At the beginning of the story, he has already made his bargain with the Devil—hardly a token that he is among God's elect but not necessarily a sign of damnation, either, if he can reject the consummation in the form of the perverted communion service in the woods. Whether by act of will or by divine grace, Brown appears to have resisted the power of evil at the climactic moment and given evidence of at least the possibility of salvation for his wife and himself.

Discussion

However, if he has, what can be made of his life thereafter? All family and community relationships have been poisoned, and if he can be said to retain his faith, he appears to have lost hope completely. If the ability to resist the Devil at his own table is victory, he has triumphed; if he has made the effort at the expense of his capability for human trust, he has met spiritual defeat (Eberwein, 23-32). Hawthorne raises the question of whether Brown fell asleep in the forest and dreamed the witches' Sabbath. The reader, invited to ponder whether one dream could have such an intensive and extensive effect, may well proceed to wonder why Brown found it necessary to invade the forest at night merely to have a bad dream. If, on the other hand, any part of the formalist strategy is “real,” is Hawthorne to be regarded as a Manichaean who is demonstrating the power of evil?

Formalist Strategies

While considering the various elements of formalist strategies in “Young Goodman Brown”, we may also read this story as a free will concerned less with measuring the extent of evil in the world and assessing the moral prospects of the guilty than with studying the psychology of guilt (Hawthorne, 65-74). It may be doubted that Hawthorne would exercise his creative powers merely to affirm or quarrel with Calvinism, which had largely lost its grip on New Englanders' allegiance by 1835, but he clearly retained a strong interest in the psychological atmosphere fostered by Calvinism. Dilemmas such as the opposition between divine foreordination and free will and that between God's stern and irrevocable judgment and the possibility of his mercy and proffered grace continued to baffle conservative Christians in an era that offered a doctrinally less strenuous alternative such as Unitarianism (Eberwein, 23-32). The old habits of mind had been challenged, but they were not dead.

Hawthorne's formalist strategies about Brown's guilt are acute. Part of Brown's initial firmness in his resolve to go into the woods and in his confidence that ...