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Freud Theory

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Submitted By yuanshuai6685
Words 5791
Pages 24
Title: The Problem of Faith in 'Young Goodman Brown'
Author(s): Leo B. Levy
Publication Details: JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74.3 (July 1975): p375-387.
Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Juliet Byington. Vol. 95. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. p375-387. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

[In the following essay, Levy examines Faith as a character, an allegorical figure, and a symbol.]

Few of Hawthorne's tales have elicited a wider range of interpretations than “Young Goodman Brown.” The critics have been victimized by the notorious ambiguity of a tale composed of a mixture of allegory and the psychological analysis of consciousness. Many of them find the key to its meaning in a neurotic predisposition to evil; one goes so far as to compare Goodman Brown to Henry James's governess in The Turn of the Screw [Darrel Abel, in “Black Glove and Pink Ribbon: Hawthorne's Metonymic Symbols,” in NEQ 42, 1969]. The psychological aspect is undeniably important, since we cannot be certain whether “Young Goodman Brown” is a dream-allegory that takes place in the mind and imagination of the protagonist, an allegory with fixed referents in the external world, or a combination of these that eludes our ordinary understanding of the genre itself. The story is all three: a dream vision, a conventional allegory, and finally an inquiry into the problem of faith that undermines the assumptions upon which the allegory is based.

Whether we think of the central episode of the witches' Sabbath as a dream or an hallucination, or as a nightmarish “real” experience, it must be placed in relationship to elements of the story that are outside Brown's consciousness. His point of view is in the foreground, but it must contend with the point of view of a

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