Clues and Sleuthing in “Young Goodman Brown”

While Edgar Allan Poe is generally credited with inventing the detective story, the rational thrust of narratives based on logically connected clues is the mature outgrowth of the Enlightenment period, so it should come as no surprise to find glimmerings of this style in other narratives. While Hawthorne wished for readers to imagine his stories as “romances,” where the “Actual and Imaginary may meet,” the effect of his romances requires a reader to do some sleuthing. In other words, if the reader is not trying to make coherent sense out of Hawthorne’s elusive nuances, then he/she is missing the dramatic effect that Hawthorne hoped his ambiguity would have. Perhaps the most essential difference between Poe and Hawthorne is that the former provided satisfactory punch lines to his tales that tied up loose ends for the reader, whereas the latter preferred to leave the puzzles unsolved.

Evidence of clues, or invitations to rational thinking, is sprinkled throughout “Young Goodman Brown.” Hawthorne provides a rational transition out of Goodman’s hallucinatory vision in the forest, describing a plausible scenario in which “he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind, which died heavily away through the forest…, while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew” (2266). But the close reader realizes that there was no sudden transition INTO the dream, which sends him/her searching back to the beginning of the text, where evidence of supernatural events (the speedy travel of his companion from Boston to Salem, the pink ribbons falling out of the sky) seems to cast doubt on the narrator’s reliability from the very beginning.

Aside from one innocuous passage where Goodman leaves the village and walks alone in the forest (suggesting that there would have been no other eyewitnesses to corroborate his vision), Hawthorne sweeps the reader almost seamlessly into the dream. The nuances are subtle. Brown is on a “dreary road” that is as “lonely as could be,” and “there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude” (2259). Ichabod Crane was also disturbed this way while walking alone at night, though he resorted to singing hymns in order to cope with his fear. Ichabod is a dismissable fool. Goodman Brown becomes downright dangerous, more “hideous” than the devil himself. But in both cases, the rational reader is invited to piece together evidence of the protagonist’s delusions.

Irving does this through hyperbole, either insisting so vehemently on the story’s “scrupulous accuracy” or defending the unquestionable authority of the text so urgently that a reader grows suspicious. But Hawthorne does it with a little sleight of hand here and there. When Brown meets Satan in the forest, Hawthorne reminds the rational reader that this could all be a dream when he interjects to explain that the slithering staff, which “might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself, like a living serpent,” should probably be regarded as “an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light” (2259). When Brown imagines Faith flying overhead, he hears “a confused and doubtful sound of voices” (2263), and at the climax of the story, when Goodman Brown and the woman who is ostensibly Faith are about to baptized into sin in an ironic twist on the Edenic fall from grace, Hawthorne interjects once again to describe a mysterious liquid in a rock basin: “Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame?” (2266). And later he invites the reader to consider whether or not Goodman Brown had simply “fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting” (2266), which sends him/her back to the beginning of this causal chain of doubt.

The thing to notice here is the tension between superstition and reason, which is an outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking. Might Hawthorne be inviting the reader to question appearances here? Certainly Goodman Brown does. However, a more serious challenge to the reader is to establish careful judgments. This is a muted message in Hawthorne’s story, and his wish to merge the Actual and the Imaginary in romance often frustrates cold logic, but one implication of “Young Goodman Brown” is the warning implicit in the conclusion. To avoid becoming like Brown, Hawthorne suggests, one ought to rely on more than just the imagination to construct one’s reality. Perhaps if Brown had stopped to ask some of the questions that Hawthorne embeds in the narrative, he could have had his epiphany about human nature without so thoughtlessly judging others without evidence.

Perhaps Brown’s silent judgments of everyone else are no better than the superstitions that led to the judgment of accused witches in the “real” Salem? The fact that Brown becomes the “chief horror of the scene” (2263) is significant. One might wish, at least, to avoid becoming such a horror oneself and inquire into the ways by which such a gloomy fate might be avoided.