Ambiguity in Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown Essay -- Young Goodman Br

Ambiguity in Young Goodman Brown Peter Conn in Finding a Voice in an New Nation makes a statement regarding Hawthornes ambiguity Almost all of Hawthornes finest stories are unlike in time or place. The glare of contemporary reality immobillized his imagination. He required shadows and half-light, and he sought a nervous equilibrium in ambiguity (82). There is considerable ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown, and this essay will examine this and its causes. R. W. B. Lewis in The Return into Rime Hawthorne mentions the ambiguity associated with the key imagination in Young Goodman Brown For Hawthorne, the forest was neither the proper home of the admirable Adam, as with Cooper nor was it the hideout of the malevolent adversary. . . . It was the ambiguous setting of righteous choice. . . . (74-75). Henry James in Hawthorne, when discussing Young Goodman Brown mentions how allegorical Hawthorne is, and how it is not clearly expressed with this author The only c ases in which it is endurable is when it is extremely spontaneous, when the doctrine of analogy presents itself with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and raped for, the needful illusion is of course absent, and the failure complete. Then 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 image forms in the mind of the reader. The Norton Anthology Amer... ... 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. Lewis, R. W. B. The Return into Time Hawthorne. In Hawthorne A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliff s, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New 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.