The Curious Style of Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown :: Young Goodman Brown YGB

The Curious Style of Young Goodman Brown The multi-faceted modality found in Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown has many features of interest. It is the engrossed of this essay to elaborate on these features, with support from literary critics where available. Herman Melville in Hawthorne and His Mosses, (in The literary World August 17, 24, 1850) has a noteworthy comment on Hawthornes tendency Nathaniel Hawthorne is a man, as yet, almost utterly mistaken among men. here and there, in round quiet arm-chair in the noisy town, or some deep nook among the preventativeless mountains, he may be appreciated for something of what he is. But un desire Shakespeare, who was forced to the contrary course by circumstances, Hawthorne (either from simple disinclination, or else from inaptitude) refrains from all the popularizing noise and show of broad farce, and blood-besmeared disaster content with the still, productive utterances of a great intellect in repose, and which send s hardly a(prenominal) thoughts into circulation, except they be arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart. How beautifully does this critic capture the basic attitude of Hawthorne, who avoids the noise and show and emphasizes his rich utterances. Could Hawthornes rich uterances be the reason for enthalpy Seidel Canby in A Skeptic Incompatible with His Time and His Past to rebuke about the dignity of his style? And indeed there is a drop of consistence between the scorn that our younger critics shower upon Hawthornes chaste creations and their respect for his style. They admit a dignity in the expression that they lead not allow to the thing expressed (62). Canby continues Hawthornestyle has a gamey beauty it is sometimes dull, sometimes prim, but it is never for an instant cheap, never, homogeneous our later American styles, deficient in tone and unity. It is a style with a patina that may or may not accord with live tastes, yet, as with Brown e, Addison, Lamb, Thoreau, is undoubtedly a style. Such styles spring only from rich ground, long cultivated, and such a soil was Hawthornes. . . . Holding back from the untested life of America into which Whitman was to plunge with such exuberance, he kept his style, like himself, unsullied by the prosaic world of industrial revolution, and chose, for his reality, the workings of the example will. You can scarcely praise his style and condemn his subjects.