The Ambiguity in Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown Essays -- Young Goodm

The Ambiguity in Young Goodman Brown The literary critics agree that there is considerable ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown. This essay intends to illustrate the previous statement and to analyze the cause of this ambiguity. Henry James in Hawthorne, when discussing Young Goodman Brown comments on how imaginative it is, then mentions how allegorical Hawthorne is, and how allegory should be expressed clearly I frankly confess that I have, as a general thing, however little enjoyment of it, and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. . . . But it is apt to spoil two good things a story and a moral, a meaning and a form and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeding writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cses in which it is endurable is when it is extremely spontaneous, when the proportion presents itself with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped an d botch upd for, the needful illusion is of course absent, and the failure complete. Then the machinery alone is visible and the end to which it operates becomes a matter of indifference (50). When one has to grope for, and fumble for, the meaning of a tale, then there is failure in the work, as Henry James says. This unfortunately is the case of Young Goodman Brown. It is so ambiguous in so many occasions in the tale that a blur rather than a distinct image forms in the mind of the reader. The Norton Anthology American belles-lettres states in Nathaniel Hawthorne Above all, his theme was curiosity about the receses of other mens and womens beings. About this theme he was always ambivalent ... ..., Nathaniel. The recognize Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York Doubleday and Co., Inc.,1959. James, Henry. Hawthorne. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1997. Lang, H.J.. How Ambiguous Is Hawthorne. In Hawthorne A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. En glewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York Twayne Publishers Inc., 1965. Melville, Hermann. Hawthorne and His Mosses. In The Norton Anthology American Literature, edited by Baym et al. New York W.W. Norton and Co., 1995. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Norton Anthology American Literature, edited by Baym et al. New York W.W. Norton and Co., 1995. Wagenknecht, Edward. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Man, His Tales and Romances. New York Continuum Publishing Co., 1989.