Hawthorne and The Human Way

Abstract

One of the most universally accepted critical judgments of Hawthorne concerns his conscious ambiguity; that he intends his works to have ambiguous resolutions is often the only thing that is clear. An excellent example is "Young Goodman Brown"; Hawthorne himself insists on the ambiguity of both the action and the moral in that tale "Whether Faith obeyed he knew not," (p.121) says Hawthorne, and adds: Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be it so if you will; but alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown, A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream. (p. 121) As this passage intimates and as criticism has come to agree, the question of the physical truth of the story is irrelevant, for the lesson is that the world is an ambiguous mixture of Good and Evil. Both the physical and moral resolutions (or irresolutions) of the tale are evocative of that ambiguity.