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

The Compulsion Toward Evil in â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† – Is It Correct?    This essay intends to show that the compulsion toward evil indicated in the tale â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† on the part of not only the main characters but also the townspeople at large (in other words â€Å"the whole world†) is contained in many of Hawthorne’s 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 â€Å"The Logic of Compulsion in ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’: Yet a scrupulous examination of the main character’s 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 Hawthorne’s, but on an amazingly rigid logic of unconscious compulsion [italics mine] in the protagonist. . . . in nearly all Hawthorne’s tales, I would maintain, the moral â€Å"message’ is a secondary element. In Salem village that fateful night when the young Puritan husband was departing home for the night, he exchanged â€Å"a parting kiss with his young wife.† The wind was playing with â€Å"the pink ribbons of her cap.† Literary critic Wagenknecht surveys some of the critical interpretation relative to these ribbons on Faith’s cap and how they convey a message from Hawthorne: Mathews finds the pastel of infancy in pink, but since pink is a color intermediate between red and white, William V. Davis prefers to take it as suggesting â€Å"neither total deprav... ...ism/ccc_toc.htm Crews, Frederick C. â€Å"The Logic of Compulsion in ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’: In Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc.,1959. 247-56. Lang, H.J.. â€Å"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. â€Å"Hawthorne as Poet.† In Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Martin, Terence â€Å"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.