Haunted by his
Puritan/Calvinistic ancestry,writes a tale with an ambiguity which creates doubt about the
nature of man. Rejecting the surety of the Puritans whose tenets held that Adam and Eve's sin
had damned most people for eternity, with only an elect who would attain heaven, Hawthorne blurs
the lines of such tenets about the elect and the damned in "."
Self-righteous and sure of his "Faith," Goodman Brown does not, at first,
fear the path of temptation that he travels with the old "traveler." However, his
certainly waivers as he believes that he perceives the old man's staff wriggling like a snake,
so he tells himself, perhaps, that this movement has been a mere "ocular deception."
Likewise, Goodman is very disturbed when he hears Goody Cloyse and Deacon Gookin. two upright
members of the congregation. Then, when he sees Faith, his convictions that she is on the
righteous path are truly shaken as the priest of the black mass sermonizes,
Now ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your
only happiness. Welcome again my children, to the communion of your race.
These words are the ultimate implication of the Puritan Calvinistic
doctrine of predestination. And, as he exhorts Faith to "resist the wicked one," there
is again ambiguity and Goodman finds himself away from the forest "staring about him like a
bewildered man." Shaken from his convictions about the elect, Goodman learns of
"misery unutterable" as he feels alone and shaken in his spiritual beliefs.
Thus, the ambiguity created in the story reflects the ambiguity of Goodman's mind. As
one critic writes,
The power and appeal of the story are
enhanced by scholarship that demonstrates that the plot is deceptive and the underlying
conflicts much more complex and even more compelling than the surface narrative.
This controlled ambiguity of Hawthorne's leads his readers to probe
themselves into the darker regions of the human heart and to consider his subtle ironies that
accompany this ambiguity.
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