Young Goodman Brown

It takes time to understand that each human experience reflects in some way the human experience, that our humanity connects us to others across time and space through language. But what does it mean to be human, and what is this thing called life? What do teachers mean when they state that great literature must reflect something universal about being human, and what do they mean when they say: you cannot be neutral, you must choose a generic, ideological perspective from which to see the world? There are thoughts that are all too often sidetracked by philistine urges, by the desire to see what is considered art as a tool by which to hammer others on the head with a political or sociological perspective. (If I say Jack London is a master storyteller, someone inevitably will say he believed in eugenics and therefore his writing is suspect.)

The reward for writing is the writing itself: writers write because we have to write; there is no choice in the matter. Which gets me to the task at hand: I want to explore briefly the various themes outlined just now—universalism, humanity, and ideology—in a wonderful short story by the famous, widely-known American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The story is “Young Goodman Brown,” and though I am not versed in the necessary jargon to explicate for academic ears all that the allusions and references meant to the contemporary writers Hawthorne wrote alongside, I have been taught, on a cursory level, a conventional understanding of the story. 

The bulk of “Goodman Brown” takes place over the  course of one eventful night that we experience through the eyes, feelings and thoughts of the story’s protagonist, a character symbolically named for his innocence (Young), his righteousness (Goodman), and the fact of his heritage, which is Anglo or English origin (Brown). Here we have an ‘everyman’ who stands in for what we are to understand as a prototypical Puritan villager newly married and living in Salem Village, in Colonial New England. 

Here is Spark Notes' version of the story’s summary:

Newly married, Goodman Brown leaves his house for a mysterious purpose. As he  leaves, his wife, Faith, wearing a pink ribbon in her cap, pleads with him to stay. She says she becomes scared when she spends the night alone. Brown assures her that if she says her prayers and gets  to bed early no harm will come to her. As he departs he looks back, feels a twinge of guilt, but is also worried Faith might have had a premonition or dream about the task at hand.

Brown sets off on a road through the gloomy forest. “With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose.” He soon comes upon a man in the road who greets Goodman Brown as though he had been expecting him. The man looks normal except he carries a walking stick featuring a carved serpent, which is so lifelike it seems to move. 

The man offers Goodman the staff, but Goodman refuses. He says he showed up for the meeting because he promised to but now wants to return to the village. Goodman tells the man his family members have been good Christians and that he feels ashamed to associate with him. The man tells Goodman that he knew Goodman’s father and grandfather, as well as other members of the church of New England, and even the governor of the state. 

Goodman Brown says that even if this is so he wants to return to the village for Faith’s sake (a pun). Next, the two come upon an old woman hobbling through the woods, and Goodman Brown recognizes Goody Cloyse, who he knows to be a respected woman from the village. He hides, embarrassed to be seen with the man, and the man taps Goody Cloyse on the shoulder. She identifies him as the devil and reveals herself to be a witch, on her way to the devil’s forest ceremony.

Soon he hears the voices of the minister of the church and Deacon Gookin, who are apparently on their way to the ceremony. Shocked, Goodman Brown swears that even though everyone else in the world has gone to the devil, for Faith’s sake he will stay true to God. However, he soon hears voices coming from the ceremony and thinks he recognizes Faith’s voice. He screams her name, and a pink ribbon from her cap flutters down from the sky.

Certain that there is no good in the world because Faith has turned to evil, Goodman Brown grabs the staff, which pulls him quickly through the forest toward the ceremony. When he reaches the clearing where the ceremony is taking place, the trees around it are on fire, and he can see in the firelight the faces of various respected members of the community, along with more disreputable men and women and Indian priests. But he doesn’t see Faith, and he starts to hope once again that she might not be there

A figure appears on a rock and tells the congregation to present the converts. Goodman Brown thinks he sees his father beckoning him forward and his mother trying to hold him back. Before he can rethink his decision, the minister and Deacon Gookin drag him forward. Goody Cloyse and Martha Carrier bring forth another person, robed and covered so that her identity is unknown. After telling the two that they have made a decision that will reveal all the wickedness of the world to them, the figure tells them to show themselves to each other. Goodman Brown sees that the other convert is Faith. Goodman Brown tells Faith to look up to heaven and resist the devil, then suddenly finds himself alone in the forest.

The next morning Goodman Brown returns to Salem Village, “and every person he passes seems evil.” He sees the minister, who blesses him, and hears Deacon Gookin praying, but he refuses to accept the blessing and calls Deacon Gookin a wizard. He sees Goody Cloyse quizzing a young girl on Bible verses and snatches the girl away. Finally, he sees Faith at his own house and refuses to greet her. It’s unclear whether the encounter in the forest was a dream, but for the rest of his life, Goodman Brown is changed. 

My teacher—the man who taught me the story in the course on teaching pedagogy—argued that Brown’s initiation—his dream, or vision, or bad trip—culminates in the revelation that everything Brown previously held to be true about his life has been false, and he lives the rest of his life resigned and cynical, but victorious in this understanding. He returns to the village and views the others as they really are. Here is that moment in the text:

“…young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard, to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint, as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?" quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine, at her own lattice, catechising a little girl, who had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child, as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him, that she skipt along the street, and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting. Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

(italics mine)

Goodman Brown must accept things in his life the way they are, and he responds accordingly. His quest culminates—it is completed—with the newly gained knowledge about the world he inhabits. He must resist the urge to knowledge gained in the service of Evil (their participation in the ceremony will reveal to them all the wickedness in the world). This is Joseph Campbell's “Hero’s Journey” applied to "Young Goodman Brown," but also to the Biblical story in Genesis of Adam and Eve. My professor taught this ideology to my pedagogy class

The Spark Notes interpretation of the story, in the section of their textual interpretation labeled “Summary,” equates Goodman Brown to Adam (from Genesis) and  Faith to Eve, who succumbs to temptation. In the Spark Notes analysis, Hawthorne wrote the story as an attack on American religion.

More than an attack on American religion I see Hawthorne's story as an attack on the hypocrisy of respectable society. Brown resists temptation and passes out. Like the later protagonist in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, we see the  prototypical everyman as somewhat sheepish but intelligent enough to avoid the pitfalls of life; in this case Brown is tempted by power. 

When he awakens, the next morning, Goodman Brown's brow is softened "by the coldest dew." He is Baptized. From here forth he sees the people around him for their vanity and hypocrisy. He has experienced, either in real waking life or in a dream, that good and evil intertwine. There aren't 'good' and 'bad' people, there are only people and they should be based on their individual choices. He cannot understand Faith's choice and he can no longer take the village hierarchy seriously. 

If Hawthorne attacks religion (Puritanism) in "Young Goodman Brown," he takes aim at its aversion to Nature. Young Goodman is blessed by the morning dew: the thing that wakes him, the one truth in his life, is Nature; Nature was the very thing the suspicious Puritan mind feared most: the wilderness and the natural world, to the Puritans, was anathema to progress.

There is great irony at the heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” On the one hand, those community members privileged with the right to ascertain evil in the outside world turn out to consist of evil themselves, and Goodman Brown begins to experience, at the culmination of his trip, those community members privileged with the right to ascertain evil in the outside world as multifaceted. The story does touch on something profoundly human in that it relates to loss. 

The Crossing 

Cormac McCarthy

When I have written about literature on this blog I have, up until what I wrote about Gatsby, given a clear outline of plot and wrapped my blog post up with a comment or opinion about the book I reviewed. I have done this in order to keep it simple: tell what happens--i.e. the plot--and then describe the plot's implementation. I try to explain, in other words, the aesthetic choices the writer employs in telling his story.

With the novel Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje, the stories encapsulated between the pages of the book are multiple and far reaching and because the foregrounded plot relates to the narrator, I derive meaning from the way the story is told. The telling relates to how stories are told and to the inner workings of human consciousness as much as it is about childhood abandonment, the system of education in England, London  as it existed at the time of World War II, etc. 

It is true, too, to an extent, with The Great Gatsby, that consciousness belies reality. Here the plot line seeps out over the course of the novel and includes a backstory imbued by the narrator's subjective feelings for his subject as well as his commentary on class and ethics. 

Unfortunately, at times I feel we live in a world of philistines, people who delight in placing political and or sociological concerns before aesthetics when analyzing text. People who read for utility rather than pleasure. So it is with some trepidation that I announce to no one in particular (I figure that anyone who reads my blog will find something in it they need) that I plan to write a bit about Cormac McCarthy, a White man with many ex-wives. 

One basic goal of literature is to do with language that which has not been done before. McCarthy's style markings litter his oeuvre: he uses no quotation marks to delineate character speech; his texts are filled with characters who speak Spanish; and his prose, generally, mimics the language of the Old Testament, or, at the very least, William Faulkner or Herman Melville's Moby Dick.  

This last is important because McCarthy writes books of young men on quests. His Border Trilogy, of which The Crossing is book two, relates two coming-of-age stories set just before and right after the Second World War on the borderland between Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. In All the Pretty Horses, a sixteen year old sets off on horseback with his best buddy to explore Northern Mexico and to try to work there as a ranch hand after his mother, who has long separated from his War traumatized father, sells the family ranch.

In The Crossing a teenage boy in New Mexico living near the Arizona and Mexico border is tasked with capturing a wolf that has been killing his family's cattle. Instead of euthanizing the pregnant she wolf, after catching her, he puts her on a leash and decides to ride his horse into the mountains of Mexico where he will set her free, returning her to her rightful place in the world.

Things don't go as planned because there is no plan. The adventure with the wolf is followed by a return home, where the boy, Billy, discovers all of his family save his younger brother have been killed, a return to Mexico with his brother, Boyd, in search of the family's horses, a separation there from his brother, another return to New Mexico, and then a final journey to Mexico and back, this time to find and return with his brother.

Billy Parham's quest is divided into three. In the first part he aims to put the world back as it ought to be, or as it was once: before the Spanish and Anglo ranchers fenced off land and began raising domesticated stock. Of course he soon discovers the futility in this venture, but as life so often does, his first decision leads him to his second quest and the attempted recovery of his patrimony, in the form of his father's two stolen horses.

Finally, he returns to Mexico, one last time, to retrieve his brother, who he has been separated from and who, it turns out, has become a legend of the Revolution, a person songs are written about for bravery in battle. His brother has been made a relic, romanticized as a symbol of a mythic time and place where good defeats evil and so by the end of the book we realize that on Billy's quest, unique and complete, he discovers that all that he thought true about the world, all that he held sacred and all he believed, has both led him to this point, his fate, and left him to deal with it alone. 

He wanders the desert of New Mexico, homeless, adrift, without family, looking for work, and in the last pages of the book witnesses, first hand, the detonation of the first test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo. It is an apocalyptic ending to a unique novel oozing at the edges with dark matter. 

The genius of Cormac McCarthy relates to the fact that he imbues his fiction, from top to bottom, with historic fact and he employs this fact to undermine ideology from left to right. In The Crossing, when Billy and his brother Boyd go looking for their stolen horses, they discover them on a massive ranch owned by an American media magnet. McCarthy models this ranch on Babicora Ranch, owned by William Randolph Hearst, scion of the Hearst family, which existed in the north of the state of Chihuahua until 1953. It was 117 miles long and consisted of more than one million acres. In '53 the Mexican Government seized the land, subdivided it into thousands of parcels, and redistributed it to peasantry. (Phoebe Hearst, wife to George and mother of William Randolph Hearst, purchased the land that became the ranch in 1900 for $100,000).

In 1934, the Mexican government, under Lazaro Cardenas, should have given the Hearst land to the feudal classes. Cardenas did indeed redistribute 45 million acres. He dismantled the hacienda system. (10 percent of the lands were American owned.) However, realistically, the Revolution did not meet its aims and the fighting went on. This is where the Parham brothers arrive in the history. Security officers--private militia--on the Barbicora Ranch have the boys’ horses, and they eventually shoot Boyd in a chase after the boys reclaim the horses; these men are part of Hearst’s personal security apparatus, called the guardia blanca, or white guard. Even after the Revolution, this was contested land. (Earl Shorris, historian of Mexico, claims the Revolution never ended.) Cardenas' social reforms were corrupt. 

There is a lot going on here. On one level McCarthy gives his english reading audience a snapshot of an historical moment most don't know anything about. On another he makes comment on social reform, raw power, and idealism. As I mention, the overarching structure of plot exists in three parts; it is a triptych. There is something deeply religious about Billy's journey. We must imagine that Billy grows, that he matures, as the novel progresses. What becomes clear by the end of the text is that he has lost completely the innocence that allowed him to believe he might capture, tame, save and find a place in the world for a wild animal, because that world does not exist. 

There are powerfully dark forces at work in the universe of Cormac McCarthy, the Hearst family a prime example. In The Crossing he writes about the tension inherent between what amounts to culture, society and governance, and the interior world of the initiate's mind. That consciousness, in the shape of Billy Parham, is left battered and bruised, awake and perhaps aware that the story he has lived, in some way, represents our story and our story can only have meaning in the reality of its destination, the path on which we arrive, again and again, at fate.