Just before the last paragraph in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," the narrator poses an interesting (and perhaps unsettling) question:
"Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?"
THINK:
Why do you think Hawthorne would insert this question at the end of the story?
If Goodman Brown's curious experience in the forest had all been a dream, would the story change? HOW?
WRITE:
**Your assignment for next week is to tell us whether you DO or DO NOT think the answer to the narrator's question matters
or makes a difference in this story.
Explain/defend your position.
(Practice using the paragraph structure that we learned in class for this post.)
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Hmmm, I dunno. Are people really all basically evil? Or is this a hallucination given to Young Goodman Brown by the Devil in hopes to ruin him? Or is it a spiritual vision, that allows him to see "inside" people? Not what they really do, but what their apparently virtuous outside actions really mean.
ReplyDeleteOne way of another, Brown doesn't seem to want to deal with what he's seen. If the vision were a true one, he doesn't *act* on it, makes no attempt to create programs of social change or betterment. He simply retreats into himself and refuses to have any commerce with the outside world at all because of his ideas about its sinful nature.
Seems to me that Young Goodman Brown becomes even MORE Puritan than he was before, not less. But his behavior also raises questions for me. Is it better to remain ignorant of evil, or to be able to see evil for what it really is and hence run the risk of overdoing it and seeing *everyone* as evil?
For instance, the first things that Young Goodman Brown learns are about his father and his grandfather. Both are supposedly upright members of the community. Yet the father was what we would today call a "war criminal" in his actions in King Phillip's War. And the grandfather was basically a religious zealot who flogged people with different ideas about Christianity than his (in this case the Quaker woman).
Certainly, it's better for Young Goodman Brown to know about the evil done by his ancestors, if only so he wouldn't repeat that evil in the future. But by the end, this consciousness of evil leads him to see sin in innocent children or the voices of a congregation raised in song?
Does he have any hope, then, of correcting the mistakes of his past? How can we say his father and grandfather were evil if *all* people are basically evil? That might lead to the conclusion that it was *right* to burn down the Indian village, or to flay the skin off the back of the Quaker woman.
So it seems to me that the only thing Young Goodman Brown can do is make sure that he does nothing, the easiest way to avoid too much evil in the world.
Is this what Hawthorne is saying in the story? That it's better to do nothing, and wait for death to overtake us?????
In all honesty I didn't quite understand the story so I reread it and still didn't really get it fully. I'll save my questions for class but I think whether Goodman Brown was dreaming or not is very relevant. If he was dreaming the question would be, "Why is he dreaming about witch hunting?" and if he wasn't dreaming the question would come up, "Why is this happening to him? Did he do something to make it happen?".
ReplyDeleteThis was a difficult reading. I found "Story of an Hour" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" a lot more easier even though they weren't the easiest writings. Hopefully after the discussion in class I will have a better understanding of what was going on in the story. Then I'd be able to post a better answer to the question.
Morgan Stevenson
If Goodman Brown had dreamed the entire story, it would change the entire meaning of the story. If it was all a dream then none of it really matters. The only reason the story would matter is if the dream had a deeper meaning to a later occurence. For the sake of this arguement the entire story has no purpose as far as I can see if it was an entire dream. Almost like a waste of the reader's time unless the author reveals a deeper meaning in a following story. As far as I can see is there was no point in reading this.
ReplyDeleteDarion Banister