The Compulsion Toward Evil in Young Goodman Brown †Is It Correct? Essa

The Compulsion Toward Evil in boyish Goodman Brown Is It Correct? This essay intends to show that the compulsion toward evil indicated in the tale Young Goodman Brown, on the part of not only the main characters but also the townspeople at large (in other words the whole world) is contained in many of Hawthornes tales, and it is an incorrect notion. Nathaniel Hawthorne used compulsion as a theme not only in this short story but in others as well. Consider the comments of Frederick C. Crews in The Logic of Compulsion in Roger Malvins Burial Yet a scrupulous examination of the main characters motives reveals that Hawthorne has approached his subject on a deeper level than the ethical that he has not asked what someone in a certain predicament should do, but rather how a man may become the victim of unconscious hypocrisies over which he has no ethical control at all. Indeed, the working-out of the plot is strictly dependent, not on a religious attitude of Hawthornes, but on an amazi ngly rigid logic of unconscious compulsion italics mine in the protagonist. . . . in nearly all Hawthornes tales, I would maintain, the moral message is a secondary element. In Salem village that fateful night when the young Puritan husband was departing home for the night, he exchanged a parting kiss with his young wife. The wind was playing with the pink ribbons of her cap. Literary critic Wagenknecht surveys some of the critical interpretation relative to these ribbons on Faiths cap and how they convey a message from Hawthorne Mathews finds the pastel of infancy in pink, but since pink is a color intermediate amid red and white, William V. Davis prefers to take it as suggesting neither total deprav... ...ism/ccc_toc.htm Crews, Frederick C. The Logic of Compulsion in Roger Malvins Burial In Hawthorne A Collection of Critical Essays, edit by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New Yo rk Doubleday and Co., Inc.,1959. 247-56. Lang, H.J.. How Ambiguous is Hawthorne? In Hawthorne A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Leavis, Q.D. Hawthorne as Poet. In Hawthorne A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Martin, Terence Six Tales. In Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York Twayne Publishers Inc., 1965. Wagenknecht, Edward. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Man, His Tales and Romances. New York Continuum Publishing Co., 1989.