The Ambiguity in Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown Essays -- Young Goodm

The Ambiguity in unseas atomic number 53d Goodman Brown The literary critics agree that there is considerable ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthornes early Goodman Brown. This essay intends to illustrate the previous statement and to analyze the cause of this ambiguity. heat content James in Hawthorne, when discussing Young Goodman Brown comments on how imaginative it is, therefore mentions how allegorical Hawthorne is, and how allegory should be expressed clearly I aboveboard confess that I have, as a general thing, but precise enjoyment of it, and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. . . . yet it is apt to spoil two good things a story and a moral, a meaning and a form and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeding writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cses in which it is endurable is when it is highly spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself with eager promptitude. When it shows s igns of having been groped and fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course absent, and the ruin complete. so the machinery alone is visible and the end to which it operates becomes a matter of indifference (50). When one has to grope for, and fumble for, the meaning of a tale, then there is failure in the work, as Henry James says. This unfortunately is the case of Young Goodman Brown. It is so ambiguous in so many occasions in the tale that a blur rather than a distinct regard forms in the mind of the reader. The Norton Anthology American Literature states in Nathaniel Hawthorne Above all, his bailiwick was curiosity about the receses of other mens and womens beings. most this theme he was always ambivalent ... ..., Nathaniel. The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. bleak York Doubleday and Co., Inc.,1959. James, Henry. Hawthorne. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1997. Lang, H.J.. How Ambiguous Is Hawthorne. In Hawthorne A Collection of Critical Essay s, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. novel York Twayne Publishers Inc., 1965. Melville, Hermann. Hawthorne and His Mosses. In The Norton Anthology American Literature, edited by Baym et al. New York W.W. Norton and Co., 1995. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Norton Anthology American Literature, edited by Baym et al. New York W.W. Norton and Co., 1995. Wagenknecht, Edward. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Man, His Tales and Romances. New York Continuum Publishing Co., 1989.