“Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Very Important American horror story gets my goat in a way. The language can be deadly stultifying—well, I always seem to have that problem with Hawthorne, as with Dickens—and the plot points are more like blunt force objects having an allegorical go at your skull. In the end, it was all a dream but was it. With the publication date you have to wonder if it isn’t among the first to use this it-was-all-a-dream-but-was-it stunt (acknowledging I know squat about ancient literature). Obviously, first, “Young Goodman Brown” is a take on the hypocrisies of puritanism and a forthright one too. It sets up as no less than the titanic battle between Calvinism and Satanism (otherwise known as human appetite). But for all the window dressing—and, yes, it’s nice window dressing, in the American style, with macabre bonfire scenes in the autumn night of a deep New England woods. But for all that, ultimately it’s more on the order of an allegory to be ciphered than a horror story as such. All these devilish doings, the serpentine staffs and disappearing acts, etc., are just production design for a community theater story about American hypocrisy. A lot of the horror anthologies snapping it up are maybe more trying to class up their joints with a Great Author. I mean it’s a pure staple of American literature just sitting there. That’s the only way to understand it. The special effects can be delightful but also thuddingly obvious and they are patently not to be believed. That would be superstitious, the story somehow implies. Hawthorne’s wilderness is not as cool and fascinating as Algernon Blackwood’s, say, but has its own tang. There are witches with broomsticks, for example. And these names: Brown, the young good man, is married to Faith. Then there’s Satan himself, done nicely as a shape-shifter but it always feels stagy. And then, I’m cynical, but I had a hard time believing the whole blinking town including most notably church leaders would turn out to be part of a nighttime carousing mob. Beyond the credibility problem (I KNOW IT'S AN ALLEGORY) it seems to be turning cynicism unpleasantly into bitterness, next stop nihilism. If it is all a dream, Young Goodman Brown is scarred for life by it. “Often, awaking 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.” That’s how the story ends and it always annoys me and then haunts me.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
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