's
short story "," as your question suggests, is built on ambiguity: does Brown make a
physical trip into the forest in this visit to his dark side, or is his journey purely
psychological, occurring in a dream vision? Putting aside the very detailedwith which Hawthorne
describes Brown's journey and those he meets, readers with a modern sensibility believe the
journey to be psychological for several reasons.
The belief system of the
Puritans includes the conviction that evil in the form of witches and Satan himself are present
in their lives both spiritually and physicallySatan, for example, can torment and tempt a person
in dreams, and he can appear in life as himself or anyone else. Witches can appear in their
human form, and they can torment others in their "spectral" formthat is, as spirit
beings. So, it is quite possible that a young Puritan, testing his belief system, might actually
take a journey to see whether he can encounter...
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